✴Study tip✴: see how everything you learn fits into each category/ the outline of what Prof Robertson goes over in class, and try to see how each concept connects to one another

CHAPTER 7 READING, CONCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT page 240-257

Chapter Focus: development in the first 5 years

What do infants see when they look around a room?

Concepts: general ideas or understandings that can be used to group together objects, events, qualities, or abstractions that are similar in some way

• There are infinite possible concepts because there are infinite ways in which objects or events can be similar. For example, objects can have similar shapes (all football fields are rectangular), materials (all diamonds are made of compressed carbon), sizes (all skyscrapers are tall), tastes (all lemons are sour), colors (all colas are brown), functions (all knives are for cutting), and so on
• They can help us understand the world by generalizing from prior experience
  • If we like the taste of one carrot, we will probably like the taste of others

Themes in research of conceptual development

1. Nature and nurture
2. Active child
3. How change occurs
4. Sociocultural contextt

Nativist perspective: nurture plays an important role in helping children move beyond this initial level of conceptual understanding, but not in forming the basic understanding

Empiricist perspective:

• nature endows infants with only general learning mechanisms, such as the ability to perceive, attend, associate, generalize, and remember
• the rapid and universal formation of fundamental concepts such as time, space, number, causality, and mind arises from infants’ massive exposure to experiences that are relevant to these concepts

Chapter Focus —-> Fundamental Concepts

• One group: categorizes the kinds of things that exist in the world (humans, inanimate objects, other living things
• Other group: involves dimensions to represent our experiences (space, time, number, causality)
  • Who what where when and why

Understanding Who or What:

How do infants and young children make sense of the objects they encounter?

• They adopt a divide-and-conquer strategy: 3 categories
  • 1. Inanimate objects
  • 2. People
  • 3. Other animals(they are unsure for many years whether plants are more like animals or inanimate objects)

Dividing Objects into Categories

Divide objects into general categories: vehicles, tools, furniture, sports equipment, and endless others

Category Hierarchies: a category that is organized by set-subset relations, such as animal/dog/poodle

• Knowing that a La-Z-Boy is a type of chair allows children to infer people sit on them and that they are not lazy nor boys.

How can infants and older children form categories that apply to all kinds of objects, living and nonliving?:

1. Categorization of Objects in Infancy

• Even infants can form categories
  • Tested 3-4-month-olds, when shown cat pics, they habituated to the general category of cats: they looked at novel cat pictures for less time
    • Despite differences in color or size, infants saw cats as a member of the same category
• Infants also form more categories than just cats, the same with dogs, zebras, elephants, and so on. However, once shown a bunch of mammals they began to dishabituate and lose interest.
  • Once shown bird and fish, however, they were interested again and dishabituated

Infants use Perceptual Categorization: The grouping together of objects that have similar appearances

• Infants categorized on many perceptual dimensions like color, size, and movement
  • Example: infants younger than 18 months rely on the presence of legs to categorize objects as animals, and wheels for cars
• During their second year, children categorize objects on the basis of overall shape, even when they differ in size and texture and color

1. Categorization of Objects Beyond Infancy

• As children move beyond infancy, they increasingly grasp not only individual categories but also hierarchical and causal relations among categories

Category Hierarchies young children form to include 3 levels (ANIMAL/DOG/POODLE)

1. Superordinate level: the general one
   1. animal
2. Subordinate level: the very specific one
   1. poodle
3. The basic level: the medium or in between one
   1. dog
   2. This level is typically learned first, They form categories of medium generality, like tree, before they form more general ones like “plant” or even “oak”

Casual Understanding and Categorization:

• Five-month-olds look longer at an object that travels more slowly as it rolls down a slope than at one that picks up speed as it descends
• They also seem to know that an object cannot pass through a grid with openings smaller than the object, though liquids can

This shows they develop the understanding of casual relations, which continues more long after infancy

• Kids prefer casual explanations over descriptions
  • Turtle in a bird nest: they prefer to hear why its there

Cause and effect relations:

• Kids who were told why wugs and gillies were the way they looked (because the like to fight (their claws help) or they like to hide (big ears let them hear and then they fly away)) were better at distinguishing the difference when shown pictures over kids who were just given descriptions of wugs and gillies

Understanding Oneself and Other People:

• Infants’ conceptual understanding is shaped by their senses, particularly by what they see
  • In a lab setting knowing what they see is easy
  • In a real-life setting, it's super hard
    • A breakthrough in fixing this:
      • HEADCAMS AND EYECAMS: used to see approx what infants see
      • Infants mostly look at other people!
        • This helps them learn about the people and people in general
      • Naive Psychology: a common level of understanding of other people and oneself
        • Center of naive psychology: desires, beliefs, and actions

For example, why did Jimmy go to Billy’s house? He wanted to play with Billy (a desire), he expected that Billy would be at home (a belief), so he went to Billy’s house (an action)

Three noteworthy properties of naive psychological concepts

1. Invisible mental states: No one can see a desire or a belief or other psychological concepts such as a perception or a memory
2. psychological concepts are linked to one another in cause-effect relations
3. they develop surprisingly early in life, though how early, and the process through which the capability occurs, remains a subject of heated debate

Naive Psychology in Infancy:

• Nativists: argue that early understanding is possible only because children are born with a basic understanding of human psychology
• Empiricists: argue that experiences with other people and general information-processing capacities are the key sources of the early understanding of other people

WE HAVE EVIDENCE FOR BOTH THE ABOVE!

Emergence of self-consciousness:

• Infants are born with the knowledge that they are separate from other people
  • if another person touches an infant’s cheek, the infant is likely to turn in the direction of the touch; but if infants touch their own cheek, they rarely turn in that direction
• by age four months, infants show a basic understanding of what they can and cannot do; they reach for small objects within their grasp, but not for larger or more distant objects
• By 18-24 months, infants try to wipe smudges off their faces that they see in mirrors and make efforts to look good

Understanding Other People:

• Infants prefer looking at people and mimicking facial expressions
• Infants indicate behaviors as goal-directed
  • The reaching example with the doll and the ball: infants were habituated to the hand reaching for one thing. When later showed it reaching for the other object, infants were surprised even if the positions were changed if the hand reached for the other object.

infants do seem to attribute intentions to nonliving things: a ball trying to go up a hill, being helped or hindered. If the hinderer helps they get surprised

• Meta-analysis indicates that this is real but inconsistent

Understanding DIfferences Among people:

• Infants understand people differ from one another
  • 10-month-olds are more likely to choose a food offered by a speaker of their language than by a speaker of another language
  • By age 12 months, most infants accept one cracker from a puppet whom they observed acting nicely rather than accept two crackers from a puppet they observed being mean
    • This preference for niceness has its limits, though; when the “mean puppet” offered eight crackers and the “nice puppet” only one, most babies took the eight.

Naive Psychology Beyond the First Year:

several important aspects of psychological understanding emerge in the second year:

1. a sense of self, in which children more explicitly realize that they are individuals distinct from other people
2. joint attention, in which two or more people focus intentionally on the same referent;
3. intersubjectivity is the mutual understanding that people share during communication

15 month old will try to soothe fellow unhappy playmates

Theory of Mind: an organized understanding of how mental processes such as intentions, desires, beliefs, perceptions, and emotions influence behavior

• indirect ways of breaking bad news are a specialty of young children and reflect their understanding that other people’s reactions might not be the same as their own.
• Understanding the connection between other people’s desires and their actions — emerges by the end of the first year
  • 8-month-olds looked the same amount of time at an experimenter holding the kitten she wasn’t excited about, 12 months old looked longer
  • Children 2 years old, for instance, predict that characters in stories will act in accord with their own desires, even when those desires differ from the child’s preferences
  • By age 3 years, children show some understanding of the relation between beliefs and actions

false-belief problems: tasks that test a child’s understanding that other people will act in accord with their own beliefs even when the child knows that those beliefs are incorrect

<---- 3 year old make this false belief problem

A review of 178 studies of children’s understanding of false beliefs showed that similar results emerged with different variants of the problem, different questions, and different societies

• in no country did 3-year-olds answer more than 25% of problems correctly, and in no country did 5-year-olds answer less than 72% correctly
• Despite leading very different lives, Pygmy children in Africa and same-age peers in industrialized North American and European societies respond to the false-belief task in the same way.

HOWEVER: if an experimenter tells a 3-year-old that the two of them are going to play a trick on another child by hiding pencils in a Smarties box and enlists the child’s help in filling the box with pencils, most 3-year-old

Explaining the development of the theory of mind:

Nativists propose the theory of mind module

Theory Of Mind Module (TOMM): a hypothesized brain mechanism devoted to understanding other human beings

• Matures over the first 5 years
• This area is way different from the brain area that understands grammar fmri activity scan
• Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)
  • For example, fewer than half of autistic 6- to 14-year-olds solve false-belief problems that are easy for most 4- and 5-year-olds

Dawson and colleagues (2010) randomly assigned 1- and 2-year-olds diagnosed with autism to receive either Early Start Denver Model (ESDM) treatment or community-based treatment (the control condition)

• After 2 years, children who received the ESDM treatment showed considerably greater gains in IQ score, language, and daily living skills than did peers who received the community-based treatment

Empiricist view on the Emergence of the theory of mind:

• Emphasizes interactions with others
• emphasize the role of learning from experiences with physical situations and with other people
  • preschoolers who have siblings living with them outperform peers who do not
    • Specifically with siblings who are older and of the opposite sex. As they learn from those who have opposing interests and desires
  • From this perspective, the tendency of autistic children not to interact much with other people seems likely to be a major contributor to their difficulty in understanding others.

The Growth of Play:

• One way in which children learn about other people’s thinking, as well as about many other aspects of the world, is through play
• Pretend Play: emerges between 12-18 months, make-believe activities in which children create new symbolic relations, acting as if they were in a situation different from their actual one
  • During pretend play, kids engage in object substitution: a form of pretense in which an object is used as something other than itself, for example, using a broom to represent a horse
• Over the next few years, kids play becomes more complex, toddlers engage in
  • Sociodramatic play: activities in which children enact miniature dramas with other children or adults, such as “mother comforting baby”
    • Scaffolding by a parent or sibling in this type of play can help them learn more
  • Boys and only children tended to report engaging in pretend play at older ages more often than did girls and children with siblings.
    • People often did weekly from 10/11 and monthly from 12/13

Children who created imaginary playmates were more likely

1. to be firstborn or only children;
2. to watch relatively little television;
3. to be verbally skillful;
4. to have advanced theories of mind (Carlson et al., 2003)

Knowledge of Living Things:

• children often fail to understand the difference between artifacts, such as chairs and cars (which are built by people for specific purposes), and living things, such as monkeys (which are not created by people for any purpose).
  • Thus, when Kelemen and DiYanni (2005) asked 6- to 10-year-olds why the first monkey came to exist, the children often referred to how monkeys serve human purposes, such as “The manager of the zoo-place wanted some” and “So then we had somebody to climb trees.”
• Both 9- and 12-month-olds show surprise when they see inanimate objects move on their own, suggesting that they understand that self-produced motion is a distinctive characteristic of people and other animals.

LECTURE 10:

Conceptual Development + Social Cognition

• What are concepts?
• Types of Concepts
• Development
• Two broad theories

Types of concepts:

• Focus on fundamental concepts about
  • Objects: understanding who, what
  • Experiences: understanding why, where, when, and how many
• Children typically divide objects into three categories
  • Inanimate objects (naive physics)
  • People (naive psychology)
  • Other animals (naive biology)

Development:

• Objects:
  • Innaminate objects
  • People (naive psychology)
  • Other animals/living things (naive biology)
• Experiences
  • Why- causality
  • Where - space
  • When - time
  • How often/how many - number

Objects: Understanding living things

• Beginning in infancy
  • Distinguish animate objects (people, insects) from inanimate objects (rocks, plants)
  • Distinguish people from other animals
• During preschool years, expand to include specific properties of living things
  • Growth: animals get bigger and more complex; inanimate objects do not
  • Internal parts: insides of animate and inanimate objects are different
  • Inheritance: only living things have offspring that resemble their parents
  • Healing: animate things heal by regrowth: inanimate things must be fixed by humans
• But preschooler's theories are incomplete!
  • Example: plants!
    • Know that plants grow, heal, and die
    • Dont believe plants are alive
    • Partly because they expect living things to move
    • But experience plays an important role: children in rural areas realize this at younger ages
• AKA social cognition
• By 2nd-3rd year, children have naive psychology (common sense understanding others behaviors)
• Theory of mind: understanding that others have mental states that drive their actions
• We understand others' behavior in terms of
  • Intentions
  • Desires
  • Beliefs

Understanding INTENTIONS:

• By 6 months: understand that others’ behavior is goal-directed (fail at 3 months) (Woodward, 1998)
• By 11 months: can predict the goal of a hand (but not claw) (Cannon & Woodward, 2012)
• Goal understanding is linked to own goal-directed actions
  • “Sticky mittens” can help even 3-month-olds understand others’ goals (Sommerville et al., 2005)

Understanding DESIRES

• By 12-14 months:
  • understand the connection between positive desires and actions (Phillips et al., 2002)
  • do not yet understand connection between negative desires and actions (Vaish & Woodward, 2010)
• By 18 months: a more solid understanding of others’ desires
  • Broccoli and crackers study (Repacholi & Gopnik, 1999)
• By 2 years: Understand that desire <--> actions
  • E.g., Johnny is looking for his dog and finds him (or not) (Wellman & Woolley, 1990)

Understanding BELIEFS

• Considered a critical Theory of Mind concept because beliefs are purely mental representations of the world
  • By 3 years: Some understanding of beliefs
  • BUT:
    • Dennett (1978): true test of a Theory of Mind is understanding that someone can have a false belief
    • Proposed a test of false belief understanding in which a person’s belief leads him to search in incorrect location
    • → False belief tests
      • Sally-Anne test – 3 year olds fail, 4 year olds pass
      • False contents test( smarties/pencils) 3 year olds fail, 5 year olds pass
• BUT younger kids show false belief and understanding in some circumstances
  • 3-year-olds: When involved in deception
  • Toddlers: Looking vs. verbal responses

How can we explain early implicit understanding?

1. Infants and toddlers really understand false beliefs, and tasks for older children are too demanding (one system)
2. They have picked up on patterns of how things usually go, but do not understand the underlying mental states
3. They understand underlying mental states but only implicitly; they can’t reflect on them or talk about them yet (two systems)

EXPERIENCES: CAUSALILTY

• By 6 months, infants perceive causal connections among events (Cohen & Amsel, 1998)
• During 2nd year: Causal understanding improves
• “Blicket detector” (Sobel & Kirkham, 2006)
• Causal reasoning continues to grow in preschool years
• (Read more in textbook, including about beliefs in magic and fantasy)

TWO BROAD THEORIES

1. Nativism
   1. Naive theories are ‘innate’ sense of fundamental concepts, OR
   2. Specialized learning mechanisms to rapidly acquire fundamental concepts
   3. Nurture is important for developing the concepts further, but not for basic understanding
2. Empiricism
   1. General learning mechanisms
      1. e.g., ability to perceive, associate, generalize, remember
   2. Rapid learning occurs due to extensive relevant experiences

Debate is still ongoing in the field

CHAPTER 9 READING, Page 324-347; 354-355 (“Current Perspectives”)

Theories of Social Development:

Introduction:

Covering:

1. Psychoanalytic Theories
2. Learning Theories
3. Theories of Social Cognition
4. Ecological Theories

In this chapter, we review some of the most important and influential general theories of social development.

• Moxie the robot
• Kismet the robot learning of off other people

Key Theme: Individual Differences (as we examine how the social world affects children's development)

Nature and Nurture

Active Child

Psychoanalytic theories – Sigmund Freud

• 1. Biggest impact on western culture
     1. Successor to freuds theory: life span developmental
     2. In both this theory and freuds, it is stated that development is largely driven by biological maturation
  2. For Freud, behavior is motivated by the need to satisfy basic drives
  3. In Erikson’s theory, development is driven by a series of developmental crises related to age and biological maturation.

Freud’s Theory of Psychosexual Development:

• Freud thought that even very young children have a sexual nature that motivates their behavior and influences their relationships
• He maintained that children’s success or failure in resolving these conflicts in erogenous zones throughout the years affects their development throughout life.

erogenous zones: in Freud’s theory, areas of the body that become erotically sensitive in successive stages of development (mouth, anus, genitals)

The Developmental Process:

Id: in psychoanalytic theory, the earliest and most primitive personality structure. It is unconscious and operates with the goal of seeking pleasure

• Ruled by the pleasure principle– the goal of achieving maximal gratification as quickly as possible
• most apparent in selfish or impulsive behavior in which immediate gratification is sought with little regard for consequences

oral stage: the first stage in Freud’s theory, occurring in the first year, in which the primary source of satisfaction and pleasure is oral activity

Ego: in psychoanalytic theory, the second personality structure to develop. It is the rational, logical, problem-solving component of personality

anal stage: the second stage in Freud’s theory, lasting from the second year through the third year, in which the primary source of pleasure comes from defecation (pooping)

phallic stage: the third stage in Freud’s theory, lasting from age 3 to age 6, in which sexual pleasure is focused on the genitalia

• young children experience intense sexual desires during the phallic stage, and he proposed that their efforts to cope with them leads to the emergence of the third personality structure:

Superego: in psychoanalytic theory, the third personality structure, consists of internalized moral standards adopted form their caregivers standards of acceptable behavior

• The superego guides the child to avoid actions that would result in guilt, which the child experiences when violating these internalized standard

latency period: the fourth stage in Freud’s theory, lasting from age 6 to age 12, in which sexual energy gets channeled into socially acceptable activities

genital stage: the final stage in Freud’s theory, beginning in adolescence, in which sexual maturation is complete

if fundamental needs are not met during any of the stages of psychosexual development, children may become fixated on those needs, continually attempting to satisfy them and to resolve associated conflicts

• if an infant’s needs for oral gratification are not adequately satisfied during the oral stage, later in life the individual may repeatedly engage in substitute oral activities, such as excessive eating, nail-biting, smoking, and so on
• Similarly, if toddlers are subjected to very harsh toilet training during the anal stage, they may remain preoccupied with issues related to cleanliness, becoming either compulsively tidy and psychologically rigid or extremely sloppy and lax.

Erikson’s Theory of Psychosocial Development:

• Erikson accepted the basic elements of Freud’s theory but incorporated social factors into it, including cultural influences and contemporary issues, such as juvenile delinquency, changing sexual roles, and the generation gap
• Dveelopmental process:
  • Basic Trust Versus Mistrust (the 1st year).
  • Autonomy versus shame and doubt (ages 1 to 3.5)
  • Initiative versus guilt (ages 4 to 6)
  • Industry versus inferiority (ages 6 to puberty)
  • Identity versus role confusion (adolescence to early adulthood

Positive;

• The primary weakness of both theories is that their major claims are too vague to be testable, and many of their specific elements, particularly in Freud’s theory, are generally regarded as highly questionable.
• Freud’s remarkable insight that much of our mental life occurs outside the realm of consciousness is fundamental to modern cognitive science and neuroscience.

Limitations:

• The primary weakness of both theories is that their major claims are too vague to be testable, and many of their specific elements, particularly in Freud’s theory, are generally regarded as highly questionable.

Learning Theories

• Considers learning to be the primary factor in social and personality development.
• In contrast to Freud’s emphasis on the role of internal forces and subjective experience, learning theorists emphasize the role of external factors in shaping social behavior.
• All learning theories emphasize CONTINUITY
  • Because the same principles control learning and behavior throughout life, there are no qualitatively different stages in development.
• learning theorists focus on the role of specific mechanisms of change—learning principles, such as reinforcement and observational learning

Watsons Behaviorism:

• believed that development is determined by the child’s environment, via learning through conditioning
• psychologists should study visible behavior, not the “mind.” The extent of Watson’s (1924) faith in the power of conditioning is clear in his famous boast
• Little Albert white rat unethical classical conditioning
• Stern child rearing, fwll out of favor with the publication and widespread success of Dr. Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Guide to Baby and Child Care, first published in 1946 (Spock’s thinking about early development and child rearing was very strongly influenced by Freud).

Skinners Operant Conditioning:

• just as forceful as Watson in proposing that behavior is under environmental control
• we tend to repeat behaviors that lead to favorable outcomes — that is, reinforcement — and suppress those that result in unfavorable outcomes — that is, punishment.
• 2 major discoveries from skinners research:
  • the fact that attention can by itself serve as a powerful reinforcer: children often do things “just to get attention”
    • Time out gets rid of attention
  • A second important discovery was the difficulty of extinguishing behavior that has been intermittently reinforced, that is, that has sometimes been followed by reward and sometimes not.
    • intermittent reinforcement: inconsistent response to a behavior; for example, sometimes punishing unacceptable behaviors, and other times ignoring it (MAKES BEHAVIORS RESISTANT TO EXTINCTION, ie rather than eliminating whining in a kid, it won't go away)
  • behavior modification: a form of therapy based on principles of operant conditioning in which reinforcement contingencies are changed to encourage more adaptive behavior
    • a preschool child who frequently chose solitary activities
      • the boy’s teachers were unintentionally reinforcing his withdrawn behavior: they comforted him when he was alone but tended to ignore him when he played with other children
        • The boy’s withdrawal was modified by reversing the reinforcement contingencies: the teachers began paying attention to the boy whenever he joined a group but ignored him whenever he withdrew.
        • Soon the child was spending most of his time playing with his classmates

Social Learning Theory

• Children learn simply from watching what other people do and then imitating them
• attempts to account for social development in terms of learning mechanisms.
• Bandura bobo doll study !
• 
• vicarious reinforcement: observing someone else receive a reward or punishment
• Also gender differences

Observational learning clearly depends on basic cognitive processes of attention to others’ behavior, encoding what is observed, storing the information in memory, and retrieving it at some later time in order to reproduce the behavior observed earlier.

Bandura emphasized the active role of children in their own development, describing development as a reciprocal determinism between children and their social environment.

• Reciprocal determinism: children have characteristics that lead them to seek particular kinds of interactions with the external world. These interactions influence children’s future environments

Learnign Approach Limitations: because it is focused on behavior, not brains or minds, it lacks attention to biological influences and largely minimizes the impact of perceptual, motor, cognitive, and language development

Learning approach positives:

• they allow explicit predictions that can be empirically tested
• inspired an enormous amount of research concerning parental socialization practices and how children learn social behaviors
• Important practical applications like behavioral modification

Theories of Social Cognition:

How do children come to understand their own and other people’s thoughts, feelings, motives, and behaviors?

Social Cognitive theories emphasize the process of

• Self-socialization: the idea that children play a very active role in their own socialization through their activity preferences, friendship choices, and so on
• Central theme: active child
  • Other themes: individual differences, continuity/disconitinuity

Selman’s Stage Theory of Role Taking

• focused on the development of role taking — the ability to think about something from another’s point of view.
• role taking: being aware of the perspective of another person

In stage 1 (roughly ages 6 to 8), children learn that someone else can have a perspective different from their own, but they assume that the different perspective is merely due to that person’s not possessing the same information they do.

In stage 2 (ages 8 to 10), children not only realize that someone else can have a different view, but they also are able to think about the other person’s point of view.

it is not until stage 3 (ages 10 to 12) that children can systematically compare their own point of view with another person’s.
In stage 4 (age 12 and older), adolescents attempt to understand another’s perspective by comparing it with that of a “generalized other,” assessing whether the person’s view is the same as that of most people in their social group.

• as children become less egocentric, they become increasingly capable of considering multiple perspectives simultaneously

Dodge’s Information-Processing Theory of Social Problem Solving

• The information-processing approach also emphasizes the role of cognition in social behavior.
• Some children have a hostile attributional bias: a general expectation that others are antagonistic to them
• Self fulfilling prophecy
• Intervention strategy: Fast Track
  • by directly targeting children’s thinking about social behavior — both their own and others — it may be possible to decrease the likelihood of later antisocial behavior
• Why might children begin to attribute hostile intent to those around them?
  • Early harsh parenting predicts social information-processing biases that persist into early adulthood
  • physically abused children
    • are better at recognizing angry facial expressions than are children who have not experienced abuse, and the speed with which they do so is related to the degree of anger and hostility to which they have been subjected
    • have difficulty reasoning about negative emotions
    • abused children saw anger as a plausible response to positive events, such as a child’s winning a prize at school or helping around the house

Dweck’s Theory of Self-Attributions and Achievement Motivation

• achievement motivation: refers to whether children are motivated by competence or by others’ views of their success
  • incremental view of intelligence, the belief that intelligence can be developed through effort. She is motivated by a desire for mastery — on meeting challenges and overcoming failures, and she generally expects her efforts to be successful.\
  • entity view of intelligence, the belief that her intelligence is fixed. Her goal is to be successful, and as long as she is succeeding, all is well. However, when she fails at something, she feels “helpless.”

entity/helpless orientation: a tendency to attribute success and failure to enduring aspects of the self and to give up in the face of failure

incremental/mastery orientation: a general tendency to attribute success and failure to the amount of effort expended and to persist in the face of failure

entity theory: (or fixed mindset) a theory that a person’s level of intelligence is fixed and unchangeable

incremental theory: (or growth mindset) a theory that a person’s intelligence can grow as a function of experience

• A growth mindset is reinforced by focusing on children’s effort, praising them for a good effort (“I like the way you kept at it”), and criticizing them for an inadequate one (“I think you can do better if you try harder”).
  • 7th graders w this more likely to improve
• In contrast, a fixed mindset is reinforced by both praise and criticism focused on children’s enduring traits (“You’re very smart at these problems,” “You just can’t do math”).
• 7th graders w this most likely to flat out

individual differences in internal theories come from teachers and caregivers

Limitation

• social cognitive theories have very little to say about biological factors in social development. However, this is beginning to change

Pro

• their emphasis on children as active seekers of information about the social world.
• the insight that the effect of children’s social experience depends on their interpretation of those experiences
  • children who make different attributions about a given social event (such as someone’s causing them harm) or an academic event (such as doing poorly on a test) will respond differently to that event.

(pg 339 or 40) REREAD BOX 9.2 A CLOSER LOOK– Developmental Social Neuroscience

Ecological Theories:

• a set of theories united by the fact that they take a very broad view of the context of social development
• The developmental issue that is front and center in ecological theories is the interaction of nature and nurture, given their focus on the evolutionary history of the organism under study.
  • The importance of the sociocultural context and the continuity of development are implicitly emphasized in all these theories.
  • Another central focus is the active role children play in their own development.

Ethological and Evolutionary theories:

• concerned with understanding development in terms of a given animal’s evolutionary heritage. Of particular interest are species-specific behaviors — behaviors that are common to members of a particular species

Ethology: the study of behavior within an evolutionary context, attempts to understand behavior in terms of its adaptive or survival value.

Example of ethological approach to developmental topic:

• Imprinting: is a process by which newborn birds and mammals of some species become attached to their mother at first sight and follow her everywhere, a behavior that ensures that the baby will stay near a source of protection and food. For imprinting to occur, the infant has to encounter its mother during a specific sensitive period very early in life.
  • animals are genetically predisposed to follow the first moving object that they see after birth or hatching

Although humans do not “imprint,” they do have strong tendencies that draw them to members of their own species.

• early-emerging visual preference for faces, which seems to result from an attraction to a face shape with more “stuff” in the top half
• orient to sounds, tastes, and smells familiar from their experience in the womb — a predisposition that inclines them toward their birth parent

Bowlby’s (1969) extension of the concept of imprinting to the process of attachment between infants and caregivers:

• attachment is essentially an emotional version of imprinting, an adaptive relationship that increases the helpless infant’s chances of survival by creating reciprocal emotional ties between caregiver and infant. When the attachment relationship is positive, the infant has a secure base from which to begin exploring the world.

Evolutionary Psychology: evolutionary psychology applies the Darwinian concepts of natural selection and adaptation to human behavior.

• The basic idea is that in the evolutionary history of our species, certain genes predisposed individuals to behave in ways that solved the adaptive challenges they faced (obtaining food, avoiding predators, establishing social bonds)
  • Example: is the large size of our brains (relative to body size). The trade-off is that humans experience a prolonged period of immaturity and dependence. We are “a slow-developing, big-brained species”
    • neural plasticity

Play: one of the most salient forms of behavior during the period of immaturity of most mammals, is an evolved platform for learning

parental-investment theory: (Trivers, 1972), parents are motivated by the drive to perpetuate their genes, which can happen only if their offspring survive long enough to pass those genes to the next generation.

Cinderella effect — which refers to the fact that rates of child maltreatment are considerably higher for stepparents than for biological parents

• unintended child fatalities (e.g., accidental drowning) are also more likely to occur in homes with a resident stepparent than in homes with no stepparent, suggesting that there is less commitment to protecting children in stepparent homes
• These effects diminish after age of 4
• Limitation. Possible 3rd variable such as maternal alchjolhol use and child behavior problems , also age of step father, younger more likely to assault step kids than older

The Bioecological Model: This perspective treats the child’s environment as “a set of nested structures, each inside the next, like a set of Russian dolls

• The child is at the center, with a particular constellation of characteristics (genes, gender, age, temperament, health, intelligence, and so on).

LEVEL 1: MICROSYSTEM:

• The first level in which the child is embedded is the microsystem — the activities and relationships in which the child directly participates.
  • Pew survey gives us a sense of how aspects of parents’ own lives can influence how they perceive their roles. Lower-income parents endorse comparatively more positive views of their role as a parent, and are more than three times as likely as higher-income parents to say that experience of parenting is enjoyable all of the time

NEXT 2 LEVELS: MESOSYSTEM and EXOSYSTEM:

• Mesosystem: the interconnections among immediate, or microsystem, settings
  • parents who rate their neighborhood as “fair” or “poor” are also more worried about their children’s mental health than parents who rate their neighborhood more positively.
• Exosystem: environmental settings that a child does not directly experience but that can affect the child indirectly
  • the percentage of parents who said their child spent too much time on their smartphone increased by 50% over the calendar year 2020 — the first year of the pandemic.

OUTER LEVEL: MACROSYSTEM:

• Macrosystem: The general beliefs, values, customs, and laws of the larger society in which all the other levels are embedded.
  • cultural differences in parents’ aspirations for their children, showing the influence of the macrosystem.
  • three times as many Black and Hispanic parents as White parents report that they fear their child may get shot.

TEMPORAL DIMENSION:

• Chronosystem: historical changes that influence the other systems

attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): a syndrome that involves difficulty in sustaining attention

• heritability for ADHD is greater than for any other developmental disorder, with the possible exception of autism
• prenatal exposure to lead, alcohol, and tobacco smoke affects brain development, and all have been linked to the development of ADHD
• very difficult to establish causality
  • standing desks, such as the one used by this elementary school student, might help children who have trouble sitting quietly for long periods of time

Other pages:

354-355

Pornography:

• This extended discussion of media exposure provides just one example of the multiple levels considered by the bioecological model of child development.
• Another example is child maltreatment, which encompasses neglect and abuse

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The primary contribution of ethology and evolutionary psychology comes from the emphasis on children’s biological nature, including genetic tendencies grounded in evolution.

• Limitation of theology and evolutionary psychology:
• many of the claims of evolutionary psychologists are impossible to test.
• evolutionary psychology theories tend to overlook one of the most remarkable features of human beings, a feature strongly emphasized by Bronfenbrenner — our capacity to transform our environments and ourselves.

Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model has made an important contribution to our thinking about development. Its emphasis on the broad context of development and the many different interactions among factors at various levels highlight the complexity of children’s environments.

• Limitation of bronfenbrenners bioecological model:
• The main criticism of this model is its lack of emphasis on biological factors.

LECTURE 11:

1. Psycho analytics theories:

• Development is largely determined by how well people resolve conflicts
• Stage theories
  • But early experiences have a major impact on ones development throughout life

1. Freuds Theory:
   1. Neurologist, interested in origins and treatment of mental illness
   2. Patients symtoms sometimes have no apparent physical cause
      1. Causes seem to be unconscious
      2. Often rooted in early childhood relationships with parents
   3. Behavior is motivated by the need to satisfy basic drives
      1. Drives constitute our personality structure
      2. Focus here on the 3 structures of personality: Id, Ego and Superego
   4. Psychosexual theory:
      1. Freud thought that even very young children have a sexual nature that motivates their behavior and influences their relationships
      2. He maintained that children’s success or failure in resolving these conflicts in erogenous zones throughout the years affects their development throughout life.
   5. Early infancy:
      1. Inffanrs have instinctual drives, eg hunger, thirst
      2. Most primitive personality structure: “id”
         1. Entirely unconscious
         2. “Pleasure principle”
         3. Visible in out selfish, impulsive behavior throughout life
      3. Mother is established as strongest object of love, prototype for all future love relations
         1. Mother is the sources of security
         2. But also source of fear of loss, anxiety
   6. End of first year
      1. Drive to resolve conflicts between id and demands of the external world
      2. Second personality structure: “ego”
         1. “Reality principle” take into account reality of demands of society
         2. Reason, good sense
         3. Developes into individuals sense of self
   7. Arounf 3-6 years old
      1. Drive to identify with, emulate same sex parent
         1. Leads to Gender differences (social learning)
      2. Driver to internalizae parents rules and standards for acceptable behavior; work against demands of the ID
      3. Third personality structure: “supergo”
         1. Conscience meerges
         2. Helps child follow internalized rules, avoid actions that would lead to guilt

Healthy development involves a strong ego that facilitaets coping with reality, and supergo that is neither too weak nor too strong

1. Erik Eriksons Theory
   1. Built upon freuds theory but believed that the issues of ego are most important → development of identity is central issue
   2. Incorporated social factors
   3. Eight life stages (infancy to old age)
      1. Fixed order
      2. Each stage reflects a crisis to be resolved (5 stages listed below)
         1. STAGE 1) 0-1 years: basic trusts vs mistrust
            1. Crucial issue: learning to trust others
            2. Caregiving: consistent, warm
            3. If trust in others doesnt develop now, person will have difficulty forming intimate relationships later on
         2. STAGE 2) 1-3 years: autonomy vs shame/doubt
            1. Crucial issue: developing a strong sense of autonomy
            2. Children strive for autonomy and independence
            3. But also have doubts about their capabilities, shame about their failure
            4. caregiving : supportive, allows self-control without loss of self esteem; not severe punishment or ridicule
         3. STAGE 3) 4-6 years: Initiative vs guilt
            1. Crucial issue: initiative to meet high goals, but with regards for others

Initiative in this stage is based on social situations liek leadership roles or exploring interests in curiosities (in social contexts)

• • • • 1. Children identify with parents, internalize standards → conscience
        2. Set high standards for themselves
        3. Can put them in conflict with others → guilt
        4. Caregiving: not overly controlling or punitive
      1. STAGE 4) 6 years to puberty: industry vs inferiority
         1. Crucial issue: learn to work industriously and cooperate with peers
         2. Children master cognitive and social skills
         3. Experiences: successful experiences give sense of competence; failure can give rise to excessive feelings of inadequacy
      2. STAGE 5) (of 8 stages) Adolescemnse to early adulthood: identity versus role confusion
         1. Crucial issue: achieving core sense of identity
         2. Shift from being child to beinf adult
         3. Face many questions about future
         4. Must resolve crucial questions about their identity and their roles as adults
  1. Evaluating psychosocial theories:
     1. major influence on our understanding and thinking about the importance of early relationships
     2. BUT
        1. Many claims are too vague to be testable
        2. Many specific elements are questionable, not supported by research
           1. ID??? Superego???

2. Learning theories (breifly)

• Behaviorism and conditioning
  • Conditioning is primary mechanism of development
    • Eg, little albert, scared of rats. Thus went to bunnies and santa
• Reinforcement an dpunishment determine likelihood of a behavior recurring
• Social Learning
  • Albert bandura
  • Emphasis on observation and imitation
  • Learning is social; children learn by watching and imitating others
    • Bobo doll study (Bandura video)
  • Child is active in their own development → reciprocal determinism
• Evaluating learning theories
  • Based on experiments
  • Make explicit, testable predictions
  • Have led to important clinical and practical applications in many domains
• BUT
  • Traditionally do not consider role of cognition or individuals own contributions to development (though bandura’s does)
  • Do not consider biological influences on development

3. Social Cognitive Theories

• Children actively process social information
  • Attends to others, makes inferences, interprets, explains…
• Childs cognition is critical to social development
• Childs thinking and reasoning about social world is limited by complexity of their cognition in general
  • With development, thinking and reasoning about social world becomes more complex abstract
• Child actively shapes own development: self-socialization
• Selman:
  • Focus on development of role-taking: ability to take anothers POV, adopt another persons perspective
  • Role taking is crucial for understanding others thoughts, feelings, motives
  • Stage theory of role taking
    • Egocentric (unable to take other perspective)
    • Perspectives can differ; people may have different information
    • Can steo into anothers shoes; compare own and others perspectives
    • Take a “generalized perspective”; compare individuals perspective to a general perspective of social group
  • Developing appreciation of perspectives allows children to get along better with others
    • Give back lost toys rather than keep them
• Dodge:
  • Information-processing theory of social problem solving
  • Eg, childrens use of aggression as a problem solving strategy
    • Stories about a child being harmed by another cold; intentions are ambiguous
    • Some children have hostile attributional bias
      • Expect others to be antagonistic, have hostile intentions
      • React with retaliation
      • Becomes self fulfilling prophecy
      • Predicted by early harsh parenting
      • Effects persist into early adulthood
      • (some interventions discussed in textbook)

Evaluating Social Cognitive Theories:

• Emphasis on children as active seekers of information about the social world
• Emphasis on how childrens interpretations of their social experiences are important
• Cognitive debvelopement ← → social development
• BUT
  • Not much focus on biological bases
    • Though this is changing (developmental social neuroscience; see textbook)

4. Ecological theories:

• Very broad view of context of social development
  • Ethological and evolutionary theories: reate child development to human evolutionary history
  • Bioecological model: considers multiple levels of environmental influence that simutaneously affect development

Evaluating ecological theories:

• Take a much broader approach to contextual influences on social development
• Consideratio of genetic and evolution based influences
• BUT
  • Claims from these theories are broad and difficult to test

Main ideas from lecture:

CHAPTER 11 READING, PAGE. 396-420

ATTACHMENT TO OTHERS AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE SELF

No matter how hygienic and competently managed they may be, institutions like orphanages put babies and children at high risk

• they do not provide the kind of caregiving that enables infants to form close socioemotional bonds
• Foster care and adoption — the earlier, the better — came to be viewed as far better options.

No more orphanages in the United States

• Other circumstances that impact child development
  • Short-term separation: placement in childcare center or with a nonparent caregiver while parents are at work
  • Long term/permanent separation: when a parent is deployed overseas, when a child who has been abused or neglected is removed from the home and placed in fostercare/when a parent dies

the ways in which the early parent–child emotional bond likely influences children’s interactions with others from infancy into adulthood

• It has also provided new insight into the development of children’s sense of self, as well as of their emotions, including their feelings of self-worth.

Attachment: an emotional bond with a specific person that is enduring across space and time

• We will explore:
  • how children develop attachment
  • The ways in which the nature of these attachments sets the stage for near and long-term development
  • Biologically based, but unfolds in different ways depending on familial and cultural context

The second half of the chapter will go over children's sense of self:

• Self-understanding, self-identity, and self-esteem (shaped over time by bio factors and socio-cultural factors)
• the quality of children’s early attachments lays the foundation for how children feel about themselves, including their sense of security and well-being

Themes:

NATURE AND NURTURE

THE ACTIVE CHILD

THE SOCIOCULTURAL CONTEXT

INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES

RESEARCH AND CHILDREN’S WELFARE

The Caregiver–Child Attachment Relationship

• Adopted Romanian kids, lack of relationship
  • Emotional deprivation hinders social and cognitive development
• Arguments of why parents and kids share a special bond:
  • Breast milk/food
    • Behaviorists thinking mothers evolve pleasure int he infant only because of this association
• Monkey study – Harlow
  • infant rhesus monkey prefers to be close to the cloth mother rather than the wire mother that feeds it

Used cloth monkey for comfort/clinging to it

Unethical, many monkeys became disturbed later in life.

Attachment theory: a theory based on John Bowlby’s work, which posits that children are biologically predisposed to develop attachments to caregivers as a means of increasing the chances of their own survival

• Influenced by Freud's theory, especially the idea that infants' earliest relationships with their mothers shape their later development
• Bowlby replaced the psychoanalytic notion of a “needy, dependent infant” with the idea of a “competence-motivated infant” who uses their primary caregiver as a secure base
  • A secure base: refers to the idea that the presence of a trusted caregiver provides an infant or toddler with a sense of security that makes it possible for the child to explore the environment
    • the primary caregiver serves as a haven of safety when the infant feels threatened or insecure, and the child derives comfort and pleasure from being near the caregiver. Infants thus develop an attachment to their caregiver

Attachment important purposes

1. Enhances survival by keeping it closer to the caregiver which provides it food and protection
2. Helps the child feel emotionally secure, allows for the child to explore the world without fear
3. Serves as a form of coregulation
   1. Helps children manage their levels of arousal and their emotions

Bowlby claims attachment is rooted in evolution and increases infants' chance of survival

• Directly influenced by harlow, ethological theories, concept of imprinting

this attachment process develops from the interaction between species-specific learning biases (such as infants’ strong tendency to look at faces) and infants’ experiences with caregivers

Through the process of attachment, the child develops an

• internal working model of attachment: which is a mental representation of the self, of attachment figures, and of relationships in general
  • based on young children’s perception of the extent to which their caregivers can be depended on to satisfy their needs and provide a sense of security.
• Bowlby believed this model guides individual expectations about relationships throughout life

Meaurement of Attachment Secuirty:

• Attachment encompasses how a child thinks and feels about a caregiver. It is usually measured by observing children’s behaviors with their caregivers or by interviewing caregivers and children about each other’s behaviors and the quality of their relationship

Ainsworth’s Strange Situation Procedure:

• Aindworht provided empirical support for Bowlby's theory
• Ainsworth studied mother-infant interactions during infants’ explorations and separations from their mothers.
• Came to the conclusion that TWO KEY FACTORS provide insight into the quality of the infant's attachment to the caregiver

1. the extent to which an infant is able to use the primary caregiver as a secure base
2. how the infant reacts to brief separations from, and reunions with, the caregiver

Ainsworth designed a laboratory test for assessing the security of infants' attachment to a parent:

• The test is called Strange Situation: because it is conducted in a context that is unfamiliar to the child and likely to heighten the child’s need for the parent
  • a procedure developed by Mary Ainsworth to assess infants’ attachment to their primary caregiver

Ainsworth identified three attachment categories.

• It is important to emphasize that these attachment categories characterize a child’s relationship with a particular caregiver and is not a feature of the child; children can have different attachments with different caregivers

1. Secure attachment
   1. a pattern of attachment in which infants or young children have a positive and trusting relationship with their attachment figure. In the Strange Situation, a securely attached infant may be upset when the caregiver leaves but may be happy to see the caregiver return, recovering quickly from any distress. When children are securely attached, they can use caregivers as a secure base for exploration
      1. Between 50% and 60% of children in the United States whose caregivers are not clinically disturbed fall into this category
2. Insecure resistant
   1. a type of insecure attachment in which infants or young children are clingy and stay close to their caregiver rather than exploring their environment. In the Strange Situation, insecure-resistant infants tend to become very upset when the caregiver leaves them alone in the room. When their caregiver returns, they are not easily comforted and both seek comfort and resist efforts by the caregiver to comfort them.
      1. About 9% of children in the United States (van IJzendoorn et al., 1999) and about 10% of children globally (Madigan et al., 2023) fall into the insecure-resistant category.
3. Insecure avoidant
   1. a type of insecure attachment in which infants or young children seem somewhat indifferent toward their caregiver and may even avoid the caregiver. If the infant gets upset when left alone, they are as easily comforted by a stranger as by a parent
      1. Approximately 15% of children in the United States and worldwide fall into the insecure-avoidant category

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1. disorganized/disoriented attachment
   1. a type of insecure attachment in which infants or young children have no consistent way of coping with the stress of the Strange Situation. Their behavior is confused or even contradictory, and they often appear dazed or disoriented.
      1. About 15% of infants in the United States, and about 23.5% of infants around the world fall into this category
      2. this percentage may be considerably higher among infants whose caregivers are having serious difficulties with their own working models of attachment (Granqvist et al., 2017), and it is considerably higher among maltreated infants (64%) and among infants who are fostered or adopted (40%; Madigan et al., 2023).

Development of Attachment in Infancy and Toddlerhood:

• Is there similarity between infants behavior in the strange situation and their behvior at home?
  • YES.
    • compared with infants who are insecurely attached, 12-month-olds who are securely attached exhibit more enjoyment of physical contact, are less fussy or difficult, and are better able to use their caregivers as a secure base for exploration at home
• Strange situation criticisms:

1. Requires subtanctial resources/articifal lab environment/**low ecological validity**
   1. Extensively trained staff, video recording equipment
2. Some psychologists argue rather than falling into categories, the attachment security of caregiver child relationships should be measured along multiple continuous dimensions
   1. Study of several thousand children: security dimensions provided better explanation of childrens observed behavior than categories. Despite this researcher prefer categories
3. It is no longer strange situation beacvuse 61% of children under the age of 5 are cared for my someone else other than their parents on a daily basis
   1. A study found that at childcare ouck up and drop off, 67% were classified as secure, 9% were insecure-avoidant, 14% were insecure-resistant, and 10% were disorganized/disoriented. This aligns witht he strange situation result. So maybe ecological validity is not a problem!

Does childrens time away from primary caregivers interfere with there ability to form secure attachments with their parents?

• NICHD’s study measured (1) characteristics of children’s families and their childcare settings, (2) children’s attachment to their mothers using the Strange Situation procedure, (3) the quality of their mothers’ interactions with them, and (4) their social behavior, cognitive development, and health status. The SECCYD has provided the strongest examination into potential links between childcare and attachment to date.
  • 15-month-olds in childcare were just as likely to be securely attached to their mothers as were children not in childcare. Same with 36 month olds.
    • the number of hours in childcare, the type of childcare, the number of childcare arrangements, the age the child entered childcare, and the quality of childcare did not predict children’s security of attachment
  • maternal sensitivity was a very strong predictor of children’s attachment security, even when aspects of the children’s childcare arrangements and other aspects of the family (income, mother’s education, mother’s depressive symptoms) were accounted for
    • Childcare and attachment security were related when children experienced risks in both the childcare and home contexts, namely poor-quality care in the childcare setting and insensitive or unresponsive parenting in the home setting.
• high-quality childcare can serve a compensatory function
  • in addition to not undermining parent–child attachment security, under some circumstances childcare can actually promote attachment security in the parent–child relationship.
• Chile study:
  • children who attended childcare were not more likely to have insecure attachments or to experience less sensitive parenting than children who did not attend childcare
• the only time that childcare appears to interfere with attachment is when the care is of low quality

Sources of Individual Differences in Attachment Styles:

If children are biologically disposed to form attachments to their caregivers, why are some children securely attached and some insecurely attached?

1. Parental sensitivity
2. Genetic predispositions
3. Culture

Parenting and attachment styles:

• Parents behavior is a strong predictor of childrens attachment
• Cross culturally valid
• mothers’ behavior in the home was linked with their children’s attachment classification

Parental sensitivity: caregiving behavior that involves the expressionof waarmth and contingent responsiveness to children, such as when they require assistance or are in distress (key aspect of parenting consistently linked with attachment style.)

• Fathers association is weaker than mothers
• mothers of securely attached 1-year-olds tend to read their babies’ signals accurately, responding quickly to the needs of a crying baby and smiling back at a beaming one
• mothers of insecure-resistant infants tend to be inconsistent in their early caregiving: they sometimes respond promptly to their infants’ distress, but sometimes they do not.
  • These mothers are highly anxious and overwhelmed by demands of caregiving
• Mothers of insecure-avoidant infants tend to be indifferent and emotionally unavailable, sometimes rejecting their baby’s attempts at physical closeness
• Mothers of disorganized/disoriented infants sometimes exhibit abusive, frightening, or disoriented behavior and may be dealing with unresolved loss or trauma

infants whose mothers are insensitive show only a 38% rate of secure attachment, which is considerably less than the typical 50% to 60%

Maternal sensitivity being linked with quality of infants and kids attachment is cross culturally valid, but what constitutes as sensitive and responsive parenting differs between cultural group

Interventions to improve attachment:

• infants were nearly 3 times as likely to have a secure attachment classification if they and their parents participated in an attachment intervention
• Most effective if occured earlier and if family had history of maltreatment
• Circle of security: Parents are encouraged to reflect on their own mental representations of how parents and children should interact and then are guided by trained therapists to change any maladaptive representations, such as assuming the child should automatically know what the parent wants or that the role of the child is to comfort the parent rather than vice versa. Disorganzied attachment style decreased
• Attachment and Biobehavioral catch up (ABC): developed specifically for mothers identified as at risk for maltreating their children
  • focuses on changing parents’ behaviors, rather than changing mental representations. Trainers teach parents to achieve three goals: provide nurturance to the child, follow the child’s lead, and avoid frightening behaviors.
• The ABC intervention has been found to be very effective at changing both parents’ behaviors and children’s security.

However, 23% of the maltreated children had secure attachments to the parents who had maltreated them (Stronach et al., 2011). Though surprising, this finding likely derives from the fact that abusive parents can also be loving and sensitive at times, factors that promote children’s attachment.

Genetic influences:

• epigenetic effects play a role in the expression of attachment behavior, including support for the differential susceptibility hypothesis
• participants who had an SLC6A4 variant, frequently associated with vulnerability in the face of stress, exhibited less attachment security and more attachment disorganization if they grew up in an institution than did preschoolers with the same variant who lived with their families + bise verse w people who had another genotype of the SLC6A4
• certain genes, such as DRD4 (which is involved in the dopamine system), are associated with disorganized/disoriented attachment when an infant is in a stressful environment (as when a caregiver is experiencing trauma or loss) but are associated with greater attachment security in a less stressful context
  • These two studies highlight DIFFERENTIAL SUSCEPTIBILITY: they suggest that certain genes result in children being differentially susceptible to the quality of their rearing environment, such that those with the “reactive” genes benefit more from having a secure attachment (e.g., are better adjusted and more prosocial than their peers) but do more poorly if they have an insecure attachment
• Links between attachment security and genetic makeup are linked into adulthood
• individuals’ genetic makeup affects both the way in which environmental forces influence their attachment security in childhood and the continuity of attachment security into adulthood.

Cultural variation in Attachment styles:

• Mostly all countries had the same general findings as the US on attachment
• Children in Colombia and Peru were least likely to remain in close physical proximity to their mothers, whereas children in Italy and Portugal were much more likely than children in other countries to maintain physical contact with their mothers

Attachment and Socioemottional development:

• Children’s attachment status, both in infancy and later in childhood, has been found to predict their later socioemotional development,
  • securely attached infants experiencing better adjustment and more social skills than insecurely attached children.
    • Explanation: children with a secure attachment are more likely to develop positive and constructive internal working models of attachment, which in turn helps to shape their adjustment and social behavior, self-perception, and expectations of others. They also learn it is acceptable to express emotions in an appropriate wway and that emorional communication is important
    • insecure-avoidant children, whose parents tend to be nonresponsive to their signals of need and distress, are likely to learn to inhibit emotional expressiveness and to not seek comfort from other people
• children with insecure attachments to both parents were especially prone to problem behaviors such as aggression and defiance in elementary school.
  • it is not clear yet if having one secure attachment buffers against other types of negative outcomes, such as internalizing problems (e.g., anxiety, depression) or problems in interpersonal relations.

The Self

The process of attachment has profound implications for our self-perception and sense of self, which can encompass physical characteristics; personality traits; personal preferences; social and familial relationships; or details of ethnicity, culture, or national origin.

Focus on three main aspects of the self and how each develops across childhood:

1. Self-concept: describes how indiivudals view themselves
   1. a conceptual system made up of one’s thoughts and attitudes about oneself
   2. In infancy: must learn to differentiate themselves from the environment. They do this by knowing their hands are always present while parents and toys come and go
      1. Learn by interacting
      2. Becomes msot distinct at 8 months, will cry if kept apart from parent
   3. Self concept is the First necesaary step in the development of attachment to caregiver
   4. By 15 months they can distinguish themselves and others by gender and age
   5. Direvtly apparent emergence of self 18-20 months.
      1. ROGUE TEST: draw a dot on kids face. Younger than 18 months touch the mirro, between 18 and 24 months touch their own face
         1. In developing countries, kids much older than 2 could not identify themselves
         2. Or maybe children in interdependent cultures may ignore the mark because they assume the experimenter put it there on purpose, while children in independent cultures are more disposed to explore the mark on their own

kids in interdependent countries did better

• 1. Kids with autism struggle to differentiate themselves
     1. Speak in 3rd person
     2. Interventions led to greater self awareness
  2. Kids at age 2 recognize themselves in photos and at age 3 they have more brain activity when seeing pics of themselves
  3. Self concept in childhood:
     1. As children progress, their self concept grows in complexity
     2. sense of self is largely a social construction based on the observations and evaluations of others, particularly of caregivers
        1. Evaluations can be direct or indirect
           1. Direct: teacher tells kid shes good at math, kids thinks shes good at math
           2. Indirect: parents dont love their kid, kids thinks they are not worthy of love
     3. 3-4 year olds have unrealistically confident self appraisal
        1. They understand their ownphysical attributes, abilities and psychological traits
     4. Social comparison: the process of comparing aspects of one’s own psychological, behavioral, or physical functioning to that of others in order to evaluate oneself
        1. Conceptions of self in elementary school begging to be refined
     5. At age 8-11 they can differentiate in popularity, keep secrets, and know good from bad.
        1. These abilities result in a more balanced and realistic assessment of the self, although they also can result in feelings of inferiority and helplessness
        2. Focus on characteristics that influence their place in social networks
  4. In adolescence:
     1. Have many “selves” act in different waysa round diff people
     2. Personal fable: a form of adolescent egocentrism that involves beliefs in the uniqueness of one’s own feelings and thoughts
        1. “But you don’t know how it feels!” and “My parents don’t understand me, what do they know about what it’s like to be a teenager?”
     3. Imaginary audience: the belief, stemming from adolescent egocentrism, that everyone else is focused on the adolescent’s appearance and behavior
     4. Middle teens “who am i” they can identify contradictions in themselves
  5. Older adolescence
     1. Place less emphasis on what other people think and more on themselves/what they want to be
     2. They can explain conrradictions in self with mood or circumstances / are adaptive
     3. they are likely to view their contradictions and inconsistencies as a normal part of being human, which likely reduces feelings of conflict and upse

1. Self-esteem:describes how they evaluate and feel about themselves: an individual’s overall subjective evaluation of their own worth and the feelings they have about that evaluation
   1. Does not emerge until age 8 or so
   2. To measure children’s self-esteem, researchers ask children, verbally or by questionnaire, about their perceptions of such things as their own physical attractiveness, athletic competence, social acceptance, scholastic ability, and the appropriateness of their behavior
   3. low self-esteem in childhood and adolescence is associated with problems such as anxiety, depression, and bullying, both as perpetrator and victim
   4. High self esteem can have costs as well
      1. increasingly valuing the rewards that they derive from their aggression
      2. inflated feelings of superiority and entitlement, and exploitative interpersonal attitudes — has been associated with especially high levels of aggression
   5. Sources of self esteem:
      1. Age: high in childhood, declining in adolescence, rebounding in adulthood
      2. Physical attributes: attractiveness. Kids and adolescents with this have higher self esteem
         1. Pretty privilege
      3. Gender: boys tend to have higher overall self-esteem than girls, and that this tendency persists across the life span
         1. boys and men have higher self-esteem than girls and women in the domains of athletics, personal appearance, and self-satisfaction, whereas girls and women were higher in the domains of behavioral conduct (perceiving themselves as well-behaved) and moral-ethical self-esteem
      4. Approval and support from others, especially parents
         1. self-esteem as the internalization of the views of ourselves held by important people in our lives. In this view, self-esteem is a reflection of what others think of us, or our “looking glass self”
         2. securely attached children with sensitive and responsive parents tend to have higher self-esteem
      5. 
      6. A study of transgender young adults in Brazil found that both the amount of support they receive from their parents and whether they have access to gender-affirming medical care predicted self-esteem
   6. Is too much praise bad for self esteem?
      1. Why does inflated praise undermine the effort of children with low self-esteem? The researchers surmised that inflated praise sets high standards (e.g., you must be “perfect” or “the best” at something to get praise), which in turn leads these children to avoid activities where they might fail, as a form of self-protection
   7. Self esteem in teens
      1. Impacted by peer acceptance
      2. Impacted by school and neighborhood nevironments
         1. the effect of the school environment is most apparent in the decline in self-esteem that is associated with the transition from elementary school to junior high or middle school
            1. New group of peers, teachers, harder classes, social comaprasin
            2. Support from teachers promote higher self esteem in adolescents
         2. Living in low-income and violent neighborhoods is associated with lower self-esteem
   8. Culture and self esteem:
      1. In Western cultures, self-esteem is related to individual accomplishments and self-promotion.
      2. In Asian societies such as China and Japan, which traditionally have had a collectivist (or group) orientation, self-esteem is believed to be more related to contributing to the welfare of the larger group and affirming the norms of social interdependence.
      3. Self-esteem scores tend to be lower in China, Japan, and Korea than in Australia, Canada, some parts of Europe, and the United States
         1. Asian countries emphasize modesty and self effacement
         2. Western adolescents tend to be more comfortable with being praised and with events that make them look good and cause them to stand out than are Asian American and Latino
      4. culture does not appear to be a factor in gender differences related to self-esteem
         1. boys and men have higher self-esteem on average than girls and women
            1. self-esteem of girls and women on average never reaches that of boys and men

Gender roles and stereotypes

1. Identity:involes descriptions of categories externally imposed through participation or membership

LECTURE 12:

What is attachment?

• Attachment: Emotional bond with a special person that endures across space and time
• Usually discussed in regard to relationship between infants and specific caregivers
• Can occur in adulthood

Major theorists:

Harlow and Early Views

• Psychoanalysis: infants primary drive is food; bond = secondary
• Behaviorism: inant-mother nond is clasically conditioned as the mother provides nourishment to the child
• Harry harlow: bond with mother,caregiver developes due to the sense of security
  • Wire vs cloth surrogate monkey mother, all monkeys had access to both. The only difference was whether the cloth or wire mother was feeding them
    • Findings: regardless which surrogate mother was feeding them, the monkeys spent more hours on the cloth mother
    • Secure base: monkeys would be mro comfortable exploring an unfamiliar place with the cloth mother rather than the wire mother
  • Very unethical \

Bowlby and attachment theory:

• Attachment theory: children are biologically predisposed to develop attachments to caregivers to increase chances of their survival
  • Nature and nurture
• Infants and children use their primary caregiver as a secure base from which to explore the environment
• Secure base → exploration and autonomy → threat in environment → protection and comfort → safe haven → secure base
• Internal working model of attachment
• Based on experiences with caregivers
• Guide expectations for future relationships

Ainsworth and the Strange Situation

• Extended and tested Bowlbys idea s
  • 1950: began working with bowlby
  • Fun fact: was a professor at UVA from 1974-1984
• Conducted research in US and Uganda
  • Noticed importance of reunions after separation
• Developed Strange Situation
• Infants and caregivers in a room, get familiarized. A stranger comes into the room quietly. Interacts with the caregiver a little bit, then interacts with the infant a little. Caregiver leaves the room. If infant is distressed, the stranger can comfort them as needed.

4 classifciations based on the strange situation:

1. Secure
   1. Most common
   2. Caregiver as secure base
   3. Distressed when caregiver leaves, comforted at reunion
2. Insecure resistant
   1. 10% of children
   2. Cling to caregiver, do not explore
   3. Distressed when caregiver leaves, not comforted at reuinion
3. Insecure avoidant
   1. 15% of children
   2. Ignore caregiver, including at reunion
   3. Equally comforted by caregiver and stranger
4. Disorganized/disoriented
   1. Added by later researchers
   2. ~15% in US and 24% globally
      1. Higher for maltreated infants
   3. Inconsistent, confused behavior (approach and withdraw from caregivers)

LIMITATIONS to ainsworth:

• Ecological validity
  • Lab behavior tends to match behavior at home
• Cultural bias?
  • Inspired work in uganda and US
  • Cultural differences: german babies and avoidant patterns: german babies and avoidant patterns; japanese babies and resistant patterns
  • Attachment theory (and strange situation) assume western middle class perspective

Development:

• Indiscriminate attachments
  • ~6 weeks to 6 or 7 months
  • Come to expect social reciprocity (e.g., still face procedure experiment. Parents smile at kid and then get a cue to drop the smile.The kid then tries to smile to get th eparent to smile back. When they dont get a smile back they cry ir get fussy
• Specific attachment
  • 7-9 months
  • Stranger anxiety
    • Infants are more wary of strangers
    • Peaks 8-10 months
  • Separation anxiety
    • Appears 6-8 months (earlier in non industrialized societies)
    • Peals 14-18 months
• Multiple attachments
  • ~9-18 months

Secure attachment in infancy predicts better social and emotional outcomes

• Hgiher social competence with peers fewer eternalizazing problems (eg, aggression nd hostility)
• To a lesser extent: fewer internalizing problems (eg. anxiety, depressoin, social withdrawal)

Developmental cascades

Applications:

Developing healthy attachments

Behaviorism: John Watson

• Do not hug or ksis them or let them sit on your lap. Gove them a pat if they do good. If you must kiss them once on the forehead when they say goodnight

Attachment theory:

• “You cant spoil a baby”
• Eg. feed infants when they are hungry vs on a regimented schedule

YOU CANT SPOIL A BABY WITH LOVE ! itll help them with later development

Parenting

• Sensitive caregiving
  • Sensitivity and responsiveness to infants signals
  • Cooperation with infants behavior
  • Psychological accessibility
  • Emotional acceptance
  • With caveat: cultural context matters; sensitive behaviors vary
• Childcare typically does not interfere with attachment
  • 15 month olds in childcare just as likely to be securly attached to their mothers
  • Highquality childcare can compensate for less sensitive caregiving
  • Textbook: box 11.1
• Resources in charlottesville
  • Parent coaching
  • Secure child and virginia attachment center: education and therapy/theraputic interventions
  • Ainsworth attachment clinic: care for children (borth through adolescence) who have experienced challenges/disruptions to attachment bonds
  • Reclaimed hope initiative: parent support groups

Attachent in adulthood:

1. Secure
   1. Higher intimacy and commitment in romantic relationships
   2. More likely ro respond sensitively to own children (intergeneration transmission of attachment)
2. Insecure resistant (axious)
   1. Less satisfaction and srtabilitym higher conflict in romantic relationships
3. Insecure avoidant
   1. Less intimacy, lower support, more coercion, underesrimates of partners love in romantic relationships
4. Overall:
   1. Attachment styles less malleable tahn in childhood
   2. Foundations are not fate
   3. Adults can develope relationship specific attachment syles
   4. Attachment-based treatments can imporve relationship quality

• “Earned security”
  • Secure client therapist relationship
  • Help client reflect on thoughts and emotions
  • Help client understand defenses – responses to perceived threats
• Counseling resources at UVA
  • Care and support services – helps with referrals
  • Counseling and psychological services - 1:1 appoint,ents/support groups
  • Timely care – 24/7 on demand access
  • Maxine platzer Lynn Women’s center – Counseling (not just for women)
  • Counseling center referral database

Key Takeaways:

• What is attachment?
  • Attachment is a specific, emotional bond with a special person that endures over time
• Early theporitsys
  • Attachment styles can be identifdied by how infants respond to a brief separation and reunion with their caregiver
  • Sensitive caregiving tends to predict secure attachments
• Development
  • Early attachment styles predict later social success but are not deterministic

CHAPTER 12 READING, PAGE. 432-449 the family

Themes

NATURE AND NURTURE - child’s heredity and rearing influence each other and jointly affect the child’s development

THE ACTIVE CHILD - how children influence the way their parents socialize them

THE SOCIOCULTURAL CONTEXT - parenting practices are strongly influenced by cultural beliefs, biases, and goals and are related to different outcomes for children in different cultures

INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES - different parenting styles, child-rearing practices, and family structures are associated with differences in children’s social and emotional functioning

RESEARCH AND CHILDREN’S WELFARE - parenting influences the quality of children’s day-to-day experience, as well as children’s beliefs and behaviors, understanding patterns of family functioning

Introduction to chapter:

• Everyone defines family differently

In this chapter, we define family from the perspective of a child:

Family: a group that involves at least one adult who is related to the child by birth, marriage, adoption, or foster status and who is responsible for providing basic necessities as well as love, support, safety, stability, and opportunities for learning

In this chapter, we will explore how each family factor can impact the development

Family Structure:

Family structure: the number of and relationships among the people living in a household

• Can be impacted by sudden traumatic changes but also gradual societal changes

Changes in Family Structure in the United States:

1. More children live with single parents
   1. 
   2. the likelihood that a child in the United States will live with a single parent is greater for some racial and ethnic groups and for some socioeconomic groups than for others.
   3. Children with parents with college degrees are much less likely to live with a single parent than those whose parents only attended high school
   4. BIG IMPLICATIONS:
      1. 33% live below the federal poverty line
      2. Less time to spend with each kid because of all the other responsibilities
      3. Less likely to read to kids, same likelihood of eating breakfast with kids
2. First-time parents are older than in the past
   1. The average age of having first kid went from 21 to 27 in the US
   2. 28 to 31 in Canada
      1. This average has increased both because women are delaying when they have children and because the teen birth rate has been decreasing.
   3. BENEFITS:
      1. Parents have more education and are more financially stable
      2. Planned births so they overall have fewer children, and have more financial resources
      3. Older parents are less harsh, thus leading to less problems in the future
   4. Teen Parents:
      1. births to teen girls between ages 15 and 17 have declined by 77% over the past two decade
      2. Teen birth rate is higher in middle and low-income households, but the global rate has still decreased overall
      3. Positive home life → less risk
      4. Kids of teen moms struggle more with cognitive abilities
         1. Teen parents spend less time doing things like reading with their kids, this can have an impact
      5. Teen tot intervention program
         1. teen mothers in the program were higher in caretaking skills, higher in self-esteem, and lower in rates of repeat pregnancy than teen mothers in the control grou
            1. Did not reduce depression sysmtoms or chance of maltreatment
3. More children live with grandparents
   1. 1 in 10 US children live with their grandparents, since 1970, percent of kids living with their grandparents doubled 3-6%
   2. Lower income
      1. added cost of caring for children on what may be fixed retirement incomes
   3. No social support system w peers their age
   4. Kids more likely to have behavioral issues
4. Families are smaller
   1. Maybe due to delaying preganzies, increased access to birth control
   2. % of woman w 3 or more kids decreased while 2 or under decreased
5. Family structures are more fluid
   1. Incvreased divorce rates
   2. ⅓ of 17 year olds face a major change in family structure
   3. The more family structure transitions a child undergoes, the more instability the child experiences, which can lead to the development of behavior problems

Same-Sex Parents:

• 1% of all kids live with same sex parents
  • ⅔ of whom are biologically related to one of their parents
• children with same-sex parents are not different from children of different-sex parents in terms of mental health, behavior, and academic achievement. Even in sexual orientation and gender identity
• children with LGBTQ+ parents actually had better psychological adjustment and higher levels of parent–child relationship quality

*** there is no evidence of a causal link between parents’ sexual orientation and children’s development across a range of domains***

Cohabiting Parents:

• 5% of kids live with cohabiting but unmarried parents
• Have worse health outcomes, education and worse behavior
• More than half of these kids have 1 biological parent and then their partner (social parent). Partner isnt very active or willing to spend money
• cohabiting parent couples spend less money on goods and activities for their children
  • it is important to bear in mind that the majority of children living with cohabiting parents do not have behavioral or academic problems.

Divorced Parents:

• 4.6 million kids lived with divorce mom, 1.3 million with divorced dad
• stressful life changes during and after divorce can affect children’s mental health directly but can also affect children indirectly by undermining positive parenting and enjoyable family interactions
• children of divorce are at greater risk for a variety of short-term and long-term problems
• More likely to experience depression, have lower self esteem and be less socially responsible and competent
• greater tendency to drop out of school, engage in delinquent activities and substance abuse, and have children outside of marriage
• Adolescents who feel caught up in their divorced parents’ conflict are at increased risk for having mental health problems and behavior problems
• the differences between children from divorced families and children from intact families in terms of their psychological and social functioning are small overall
• for children from high-conflict families, divorce is a positive change if it can disrupt that conflict.

Stepparents:

• More than 5 million children live in households with stepparents
• Simple stepfamily, new step parent
• complex/belnded stepfamilies: both new step parent and siblings
• difficulties adjusting to the stepparent
• Difficulties not being able to see noncustodial parent
• Potential new positive relationship? Leads to reduced stress
• conflict between stepfathers and stepchildren tends to be greater than that between fathers and their biological offspring
  • They see stepkids as burdens
• Step mothers have more difficulty with step children
  • biological fathers expect stepmothers to take an active role in parenting and children reject the stepmothers’ role as disciplinarian
• Children adjust best to step parents when they are warm and involved and support the custodial parent rather than trying to exert control of children independently
• If the noncustodial parent has hostile feelings toward the new stepparent and communicates these feelings to the child, the child is likely to feel caught in the middle, increasing the child’s adjustment problems
  • noncustodial parent’s hostile feelings may also encourage the child to behave this way with the step parent

Family Dynamics:

family dynamics: the way in which family members interact through various relationships: parent with child, parent with parent, and sibling with sibling

• Families are complex social units whose members are all interdependent and reciprocally influence one another.

Parenting:

• Socialization: the process through which children acquire the values, standards, skills, knowledge, and behaviors that are regarded as appropriate for their present and future roles in their particular culture
  • Parents want their kids to be honest and ethical, hardworking, kind of person to help others in need
• two key aspects of parenting that are particularly important for children’s development:

1. parents’ use of discipline
2. their overall parenting style
3. Use of Discipline
   1. Discipline: is the set of strategies and behaviors parents use to teach children how to behave appropriately
      1. It can lead to internalization: the process by which children learn and accept the reasons for desired behavior
      2. Reasoning focused on the effects of a behavior on other people, referred to as other-oriented induction, is particularly effective at promoting internalization.
         1. Internalization occurs best when parents apply the right amount of psychological pressure on children
      3. Discipline techniques that apply too much psychological or even physical pressure on children are not effective at promoting internalization.
         1. Most punishments fall into this category. Punishment is a negative stimulus that follows a behavior to reduce the likelihood that the behavior will occur again
            1. emember that a parent’s slightly raised voice or disapproving look are often all the pressure that is needed to get a child to comply.
         2. Spanking is not effective
4. Parenting styles
   1. parenting style: parenting behaviors and attitudes that set the emotional climate in regard to parent–child interactions, such as parental responsiveness and demandingness
   2. two dimensions of parenting style that are particularly important:
      1. (1) the degree of parental warmth and responsiveness
      2. (2) the degree of parenting control and demandingnes

4 types of parenting styles

1. Authoritative
   1. a parenting style that is high in demandingness and supportiveness. Authoritative parents set clear standards and limits for their children and are firm about enforcing them; at the same time, they allow their children considerable autonomy within those limits, are attentive and responsive to their children’s concerns and needs, and respect and consider their children’s perspective
      1. children from authoritative families tend to be relatively high in social and academic competence, self-reliance, and coping skills and relatively low in drug use and other problem behavior
2. Authoritarian
   1. a parenting style that is high in demandingness and low in responsiveness. Authoritarian parents are nonresponsive to their children’s needs and tend to enforce their demands through the exercise of parental power and the use of threats and punishment. They are oriented toward obedience and authority and expect their children to comply with their demands without question or explanation
      1. Children of authoritarian parents tend to be relatively low in social and academic competence, unhappy and unfriendly, and low in self-confidence, with boys being more negatively affected than girls in early childhood
      2. Cant cope with stress, higher levels of depression, aggression, alcohol and delinquency
3. Permissive
   1. a parenting style that is high in responsiveness but low in demandingness. Permissive parents are responsive to their children’s needs and do not require their children to regulate themselves or act in appropriate or mature ways
      1. children of permissive parents tend to be impulsive, low in self-regulation, high in externalizing problems, and low in school achievement
      2. engage in more school misconduct and drug or alcohol use than do peers with authoritative parents
4. Uninvolved
   1. a parenting style that is low in both demandingness and responsiveness to their children; in other words, this style describes parents who are generally disengaged.
      1. children who have uninvolved parents tend to have disturbed attachment relationships when they are infants or toddlers and to have problems with peer relationships as older children

Should parents spank their kids?:

• Spanking does not improve children’s behavior.
• Spanking increases children’s risk for a range of negative outcomes.
• Spanking is linked with negative outcomes equally across cultural groups.

Differences in Mothers’ and Fathers’ Interactions with Their Children:

• mothers — including those who work outside the home — still spend an average of an hour and a half more with their children each day than fathers do
• Mothers are more likely to provide physical care and emotional support than are fathers
• parenting from mothers and parenting from fathers were equally important for children’s mental health
• warm and responsive parenting, whether from mothers or fathers, is universally beneficial for children
• Fathers tend to engage in more physical play with their children than do mothers.

The Child’s Influence on Parenting

• children’s behavior can shape parents’ typical parenting style as well
• high levels of externalizing problems (e.g., delinquency, loitering, intoxication) and internalizing problems (e.g., low self-esteem, depressive symptoms) predicted a decline in parents’ authoritative parenting styles (as reported by youths) 2 years later, whereas an increase or decline in authoritative parenting over the same 2 years did not predict a change in the adolescents’ adjustment
  • individual differences in children contribute to the parenting they receive
  • Consistent with the theme of the active child, children also actively shape the parenting process through their behavior and expressions of temperament
• How children behave with their parents
  • Genetic factors related to temperament
  • children with anxious temperaments tend to become fearful and immobilized in response to harsh and demanding parenting; in contrast, these same children are eager to please and comply with warm and responsive parents
• Noncompliance and externalizing problems
  • Parents escalate negative behaviors to make child calm down, this evokes more negative behaviors from the child
• Mutual influence, AKA bidirectionality, of itneractions between child and parent reinforces and perpetuates their behavior
• bidirectionality of parent–child interactions: the idea that parents and their children are mutually affected by one another’s characteristics and behaviors

Sibling Relationships

• Siblings serve not only as playmates for one another but also as sources of support, instruction, security, assistance, and caregiving
  • Some cases sibling relationships are like friends
  • Other cases they are like parent child– where the older one has more power and influence over the younger one
• Older siblings behavior impacts the younger one, but the younger one does not impact the older one
• Sibling relationships less hostile when parents are warm to them
• Cultural factors, siblings from collectivist moroccan dultre had less conflict than siblings from individualistic netherlands
• Siblings get along better if their parents get along with each other
• the quality of sibling relationships differs across families depending on the ways that parents interact with each child and with each other and children’s perceptions of their treatment by other family members.

LECTURE 13

Guest Lecture: Mother Knows Best? Maternal Interoception and Preschooler's Emotion-Behavioral Development

• interoception: perception of the body’s s signals in response to other external or internal stimuli
  • It's easy to ask someone how they feel, but harder to ask how they think someone else feels
  • The researchers asked mothers how they think their child felt
    • Maybe if she know she childs physiology, she an understand her childs emotional needs as well
    • A mother who is receptive of her childs needs can help her child self regulate difficult emotions
• Emotion regulation: is an important emotion-behavioral skill that involves both the initial and inbhibition of emotions
  • It takes time for us to learn how we should appropriately regulate our emotions
  • Children develop coping skills that reduce dependence on others (like parents) over time
  • Ex. distracting: redirecting ones attention to another stimuli
• Mind-Mindednessand Reflective Functioning
  • Mind mindedness: how the parent views their child as an independent agents capable of their own feelings, thoughts and desires
  • Less mind mindedness parents are characterized by focusing on other thinfs, like the appearance or actions
  • A similar concept is parental sensitivity, which is a caregivers behaviors, such as expression of warmth and repsosiveness to childrens neeeds
  • Mind oriented oanguaghe to describe ones child has been found to be a stronger predictor of attachment security than sensitivity
  • Reflective functioning: the parents tendency to mentalize about their childs mental states
• Why are we examing mothers?
  • Fathers andmothers interact with their kids diffrerently
  • Maternal interception may be unique and evolutionary adaptive for recignizing childrens needs
  • Mothers interoceptive knowledge relates to their children’s socioemotional
• Mothers experience heightened parental involvement during infancy, which more strongly predicts childrens heartrate vulnerability in comparison to fathers
• Mothers mindmindedness predicts childrens HRV much sooner than fathers

Hypotheses:

1. How does a mothers ability to perceive her own physiology relate to her ability to percieve her childs physiology
2. How does a mothers mind mindedness or reflective functioning relare to her ability to interpret her childs physiology
3. How does a mothers ability to perceive her childs physiology relate to her childs emotion-behavioral development

Method:

• Mixture of quaniivative and qualitative

1. Unstructured interview: asked mothers to speak for 5 min about their kids, most of them couldnt speak the whole time
2. Parent report surveys: mothers answered a bunch of different questions about their kids and themselves
3. Behavioral observation: childrens behavior was recorded and observed during different tasks
   1. Aggression!

Key findings:

1. Mothers own body awareness does signitificanlty and positively relate to their perceptions of their childrens physiology
2. The accuracy of mothers perception of their chidlrens heart rates significantly and positively relates to their parental reflective functioning
3. Mothers abilities to accurately perceive their childrens heart rates significantly and positively predicted their childrens emotional - behavioral development

Take aways:

• Emotional socialiozaton
• Emotional intelligent
• Concept of self
• Bidirectionality of itneractions / in parent-child interactions
• Emotions are complex
• Emotions are an embodied experience compromosed of a range of physiological changes, from heart rate to hormones
• Parents can recognize feelings but also the physiology that corresponds to those feelings in their children

Parenting

• We are focusing on family dynamics, go over the other information on family structure in the textbook!
• Family dynamics: the way family members interact through various relationships
  • Parents with child
  • Parent with parent
  • Sibling with sibling
• Includes parenting styles: parenting behaviors and attitudes that set the emotional climare of parent child interactions
  • Focus on dimensions of parenting

Dimensions of parenting:

• Warmth-coldness
  • Warm parents;
    • Affectionate and supportive
    • Enjoy heir children
    • Discipline: changing behavior vs rejecting child
    • Less likely to use physical discipline
  • Cold parents
    • Few feelings of affection
    • May not enjoy their children
    • Often complain about their children
• demandingness -permissiveness
  • Demanding parents
    • Impose rules
    • Watch children closely
    • Expect appropriate, mature behavior
  • Permissive parents
    • Impose few rules, if any
    • Supervise children less closely
    • Intervene only when essential

Diana Baumrind proposed 4 styles based on the 2 dimensions of child rearing, as seen below

Outcomes of parenting styles

• Authoritative: best outcomes
  • More self reliance
  • High self esteem
  • High social competence
  • High motivation to achieve, do well in school
• Authoritarian
  • Less socially and academically competent
  • More depression, agression, delinquency
  • Sons- relaitbely hostile, defiant
  • Daughters- low in independence, dominance
• Permissive
  • Impulsive, lacking in self comtrol
  • More deviant behaviors
  • Low academic achievement
  • But high in self confidence and social competence
• Uninvolved/Neglectful –poorest outcomes
  • Disturbed attachment relationships
  • Later problems with peers
  • Internalizing (depression, social withdrawal) and externalizing ( aggression) problems
  • Substance use, risky behavior

More recent perspectives:

• Different parenting domains require different styles
• Cultural and ethnic differences
  • Parenting styles may have different outcomes across cultures and ethinicity
    • Eg. in spain nd brazil: permissive parenting → better outcomes
    • Eg. in african american families (especially low income): restrictive parenting may → better outcomes

Take away:

• Authoritative parenting leads to better outcomes for many but not all cultural groups

Siblings

• Typically longest-lasting relationship of ones life
• Some overlap with functions of parents
  • Caregivers (especially older sibling)
  • Support and nurturance
  • Role models
• Some overlap with those of peers
  • Playmates
  • Confidantes
  • Social interactions, help develop social skills
• Nonshared environment
• It was long believed that birth order influenced development
  • Eg. first and eldest are more achievement oriented, more cooperative, more anxious
  • Recent research: no evidence for birth order on personality, risk taking
  • Some advantage for IQ
• Take away point:
  • Siblings play an importgant role in child development
  • Birth order is a part of siblings non shared environment, but has less consistent effects than once believed

CHAPTER 13 READING pages 466-488 peer relationships

Peers: How do children choose who to be friends with?

Play

Friendships

Status in the Peer Group

The Role of Parents in Children’s Peer Relationships

Friends play a big role in who were are

• Internet **

During covid the internet was important

Peers: people of approximately the same age and status who are unrelated to one another

• the peers that a child considers to be friends are uniquely different from siblings because those friends are chosen by the child.

Individual differences

Socio cultural context

Nature and nurture

Active child

Continuity ot doscontinuty

Research and childrens welfare

Play

Play: voluntary activities, particularly those of children, with no specific motivation beyond their inherent enjoyment

• if children are rewarded for their behaviors or are indifferent about the activity, it is not play

Play can help with many other aspects of development

• Socioemotional development **
  • children learn how to cooperate, take turns, and try out social roles
• Empathy
• Fosters cognitive develiopement
  • Oppourutnities to practice problem solving, strengthen memory and express creativity
• Language development
• Gross motor skills, coordination, balance and strength

Nonsocial types of play (observed more with kdis below 2 yeards)

1. Unoccupied play: watches things in the environment, but only briefly
2. Onlooker play: child watches other children’s play. The child may ask questions about the play but will not try to join
3. Solitary play: child watches other children’s play. The child may ask questions about the play but will not try to join
   1. all preschoolers do this at some point

Social types of play (most common in 4 years old and older )

1. Parallel play: child plays alongside, but not with, other children. They are typically engaged in similar activities but play independently
2. Associative play: child plays with other children in a common activity. The child may share toys with a peer or comment on their behavior, but the two do not have a shared goal
3. Cooperative play: the child plays with peers in an organized activity with a goal, which involves playing a game (e.g., soccer), reaching an aim (e.g., building the tallest block tower), or enacting a dramatic situation from daily life (e.g., pretending to be staff and patrons at a restaurant).

Play is essential for development

• Can help learn
• Can helop cope with dofficiult situations
• Can help with aggression and anxiety
• Improves social skills and academic achievment

In addition to being deprived of adult contact, children in orphanages are often deprived of toys and opportunities to play. Thankfully, interventions can reverse the harm that results from a lack of play.

Friendships

Friend: a person with whom an individual has an intimate, reciprocated, positive relationship

Childrens choices in friends:

• Children tend to be friends with
  • Parasocial peers
  • Peers similar to them
• Friends also tend to share similar levels of negative emotions such as distress and depression (Haselager et al., 1998) and are similar in their tendencies to attribute hostile intentions to others
• when two adolescents participated in the same activity, they were 2.3 times more likely to be friends than were adolescents who did not participate in the same activity

Culture and children's peer experience:

• In japan kids young as 2 could wander around the city, therefore made many friends
• In kenya they were constricted to their front yard so not many friends
• in cultures with traditional family values, the peer group appears to be less important, and adolescents’ well-being is less related to how well-liked they are by peers
• Children in China, Italy, and Thailand reported engaging in more relational than physical aggression, whereas children in Jordan and Kenya were more physically than relationally aggressive; children in the other countries engaged in both kinds of aggression at equal rates
  • One across board similarity: boys were more likely than girls to engage in physical aggression, but there was no consistent gender differences for relational agression acriioss the countries studied.
  • not only are there different cultural norms about what type of aggression is more acceptable but also that there is a shared norm
  • From age 9 on, in the four different countries listed here, the complexity of children’s friendship descriptions increased at the same rate, and all were nearly equal in their high ratings of complexity by age 15

Powerful factor in friend selections:

• Age
• Gender
  • 
• Racial ethnic group

Cross ethinic friendships:

• youth who indicate that they enjoy meeting, being around, and being friends with people from different ethnic backgrounds tend to be more popular and to have more friends overall, as well as to have more cross-ethnic friendships (
• results revealed that although cross-race friendships are harder to maintain over time than same-race friendships, they are just as stable if each friend considers the other to be their “best friend” and if they share a common friend group
• Difficult determining if people seek friends similar to them or if they affect one another behavior

Developmental changes in friendship:

• Children appear to have friends as early as their second year of life
• By age 3 or 4, children can make and maintain friendships with peers (Dunn, 2004) and most have at least one friendship
  • During preschool, children begin to prefer playing with same-gender peers and this preference continues through middle childhood
• From about age 5 years on, children who are friends communicate more often with one another and cooperate and work together more effectively than do nonfriends
  • Friends also fight with each other more often, but they are more likely to negotiate their way out of the conflict than are nonfriends
• children define friendship primarily on the basis of actual activities with their peers and tend to define “best friends” as peers with whom they play all the time and share everything
• Asian and western countries
  • throughout middle childhood, children increasingly define their friendships in terms of characteristics such as companionship, similarity in attitudes/interests, acceptance, trust, genuineness, mutual admiration, and loyalty’
• 9 YEARS OF AGE: CHILDREN ARE MORE SENSIITVE TO NEEds of others and tame care of one another
• Adolescence: friendships become more exclusive
  • Increasingly important source of intimacy and self disclosure, as well as a source of honest feedback
  • friendships in adolescence can also be less stable than they were in middle childhood; whereas 75% of friendships at age 10 persist for the entire school year, only half endure in adolescence

The Role of the Internet and Social Media in Friendships

electronic communication facilitates the creation and maintenance of friendships among children:

1. Greater anonymity: helps shyer kids as it reduces social inhibitions
2. Less emphasis on physical appearance
3. More control over interactions: can control when, how, and with whom they connect, leads children to feel they are in charge of their social lives.
4. Finding similar peers: is much easier, increases sense of belongingness
5. 24/7 access: contact throughout the day, could interfere with school and sleep
6. It’s fun: to connect with friends online and to share thoughts, photos, videos, and game time online

rich-get-richer hypothesis, which proposes that those children who already have good social skills benefit from the Internet and related forms of technology when it comes to developing friendships

• socially competent people may benefit most from the Internet because they are more likely to interact in appropriate and positive ways when engaged in social networking.
• Shyer people tend to lash out or vent online inappropriately
• Social compensation hypothesis:
  • argues that social media may be especially beneficial for lonely, depressed, and socially anxious adolescents
  • Could benefit from social media /make friends
• Internet and social media have changed how teens interact with one another and can affect their mental health
• FROM 2006-17 internet usage increased and in person interactions decreased steadily as well
  • Internet and social media usage increased suggests that online interactions may not be as satisfying to teens as in-person interactions, and are therefore not direct substitutes for them

time spent by teens in video chats was unrelated to their happiness or loneliness;

• but in 2020 (during the height of the pandemic), time spent in video chats was associated with greater happiness — yet, paradoxically, also with more loneliness
  • Regardless, face to face interaction is necessary to counteract feelings of lonliness

Effects of Friendships on Psychological Functioning and Behavior

1. Support and validation
   1. Children who experience chronic friendlessness are more likely than children with friends to develop symptoms of depression and social withdrawal
      1. young children have more positive initial attitudes toward school if they begin school with a large number of established friends as classmates
   2. British kids who had the same bestfriend from the transition of middle school to highschool performed better in HS and has less behavioral issues
   3. Friendships may also serve as a buffer against unpleasant experiences, such as being yelled at by a teacher, being excluded or victimized by peers, or being isolated from other peers
   4. Having a friend present when negative experiences occur decreased stress and cortisol levels. With a friend the change was way less significant
   5. 
2. The Development of Social and Cognitive Skills
   1. Friendships provide a context for the development of social skills and knowledge that children need to form positive relationships with other people.
      1. Kids w more positive relationships show more empathy
      2. those with high-quality friendships improved in the quality of their reported strategies for helping friends deal with social stressors
   2. promotes cognitive skills and enhances performance on both academic and creative tasks
   3. Group projects done by friends are of higher quality
      1. friends support each other’s academic engagement and eagerness to succeed.
   4. enhances children’s social and emotional health, including less depression and loneliness
      1. From childhood can impact years later into adulthood
   5. children who had best friends were viewed by classmates as more mature and competent, less aggressive, and more socially prominent
      1. Thirteen years later, individuals who had best friends at age 10 reported greater success in college and in their family and social lives than did individuals who had not had a best friend at age 10. They also reported higher levels of self-esteem, fewer legal problems, and less psychopathology
3. The Potential Costs of Friendships and Negative Peer Interactions
   1. peer socialization hypothesis: peers are similar to one another because adolescents adapt their behavior to be more like their influential peers
   2. peer selection hypothesis: peers are similar to one another because adolescents choose friends who are similar to them and engage in the same behaviors they do
   3. Not all peer interactions are positive, however — even when those peers are considered to be a child’s close friends.
      1. Agression and disruptiveness
         1. children who have antisocial and aggressive friends tend to exhibit antisocial, delinquent, and aggressive tendencies themselves
         2. Peer socialization and peer selection may work together to explain why friends tend to have similar levels of aggression and problem behavior
            1. Through their talk and behavior, youths who are aggressive and antisocial may both model (socialize) and reinforce (select) aggression and deviance in one another by making these behaviors seem acceptable, a process known as deviancy training (begins as early as age 5 and can predict antisocial and delinquency behaviors in adolescence
      2. Alcohol and substance abuse
         1. Adolescents tend to have friends who engage in the same levels of alcohol and substance use as they do, and evidence suggests that both peer socialization and peer selection processes may explain this tendency
            1. peer substance use predicts changes in an adolescent’s own substance use over time

their higher level of substance use also led their peers to further elevate these behaviors (

• • • • 1. Kids w authoritative parents are less likely to fall to peer pressure

Authoritarian more likely

• • 1. Bullying and victimization
       1. Rates peak in middlesschool and decrease steadily throughout highschool
          1. Over one in ten adolescents admit to bullying others
       2. 
       3. Why do some children bully others?
          1. To seem powerful/gain status
          2. Cyberbullying: repeated and intentional harassment or mistreatment of an individual via digital devices such as smartphones, computers, and tablets
          3. 
       4. The no trap: ??????
       5. about 6% of children started off experiencing bullying but transitioned into committing acts of bullying; these victims-to-bullies had rates of anxiety and depression that were as high as or higher than children who only experience bullying
       6. three-quarters of children who are bullied report having a classmate who defends them against bullies and that the children who defend others against bullies tend to have empathy for the victims and confidence that they will be successful
       7. relational aggression:
          1. a kind of aggression that involves excluding others from the social group and attempting to do harm to other people’s relationships; it includes spreading rumors about peers, withholding friendship to inflict harm, and ignoring peers when angry or frustrated or trying to get one’s own way

Gender Differences in the Functions of Friendships

• girls are also more likely than boys to co-ruminate with their close friends
• More likely to feel betrayed with friendship betrayal
• Rely on their friends metionally
• More susceptible to depression if helping a friend through depression

Status in the Peer Group

Children and adolescents are often extremely concerned with their peer status: being popular is of great importance, and peer rejection can be a devastating experience.

• Rejection is a big concern
  • Can cause dropping out, problem behavciors, leading to having no friends

Researchers study the concurrent and long-term effects associated with peer status

Measurement of peer status

The most common method developmentalists use to assess peer status is to ask children to rate how much they like or dislike each of their classmates. Alternatively, they may ask children to nominate classmates whom they like the most or the least, or whom they do or do not like to play with

• This information produces:
  • sociometric status: a measurement that reflects the degree to which children are liked or disliked by their peers as a group
    • 5 groups

1. Popular
2. Rejected
3. Neglected
4. Average
5. Controversial
   • Over relatively short periods such as weeks or a few months, children who are popular or rejected tend to remain so, whereas children who are neglected or controversial are likely to acquire a different status
   • Over longer periods, children’s sociometric status is more likely to change.

Why are some children liked better than others?

1. Physical attractiveness
2. Athleticism
3. The friends one has
4. variety of other factors, including children’s social behavior, personality, cognitions about others, and goals when interacting with peers.

POPULAR CHILDREN:

• popular (peer status): children or adolescents who are viewed positively (liked) by many peers and are viewed negatively (disliked) by few peers
  • tend to be skilled at initiating interaction with peers and at maintaining positive relationships with others
  • received by their peers, teachers, and adult observers as cooperative, friendly, sociable, helpful, and sensitive to others
  • Able to regulate their own emotions and behaviors
  • Have high number of low-conflict reciprocated friendships
  • tend to have more emotional and behavioral strengths compared to children in the other sociometric groups
  • Have more aggression
  • Not always the most likeable in the group but the most liked bc of attractiveness or athleticism
  • Popular children are thus able to control the interactions of their peers.
    • “Can u play later theres too many people here”
    • “You hate her right?”

REJECTED CHILDREN:

• Rejected (peer status): children or adolescents who are liked by few peers and disliked by many peers
  • children with lower theory of mind abilities had lower prosocial behavior one year later and then higher rejection by their peers two years later

Fostering childrens peer acceptance:

• Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies (PATHS) curriculum, in which children from 4 to 11 years of age learn to identify emotional expressions (using pictures, for example) and to think about the causes and consequences of different ways to express emotions (Domitrovich et al., 2007; Domitrovich et al., 2010). In addition, the program provides children with opportunities to develop conscious strategies for self-control through verbal mediation (self-talk) and practicing ways to self-regulate.
  • When confronted with a stressful social situation, red signals children to stop and calm down, which they can do by breathing deeply and calmly identifying the problem and their feelings about it. Next, yellow signals children to take it slow, consider potential solutions, and decide on a productive course of action. Finally, green signals children to go and try out their chosen solution. A final step in this process encourages reflection and evaluation of the results and the formulation of new plans if necessary
• in several countries, including the United States, found that children who participate in the program experience a significant gain in their socioemotional skills, smaller gains in their prosocial behavior and academic performance, and small reductions in their behavior problems

A majority of rejected children tend to fall into one of these two categories

1. Aggressive rejected children: children who are viewed by their peers as especially prone to physical aggression, disruptive behavior, delinquency, and negative behavior such as hostility and threatening others
   1. at risk for becoming even more aggressive over time, and for engaging in delinquent behavior and to exhibit symptoms of ADHD, conduct disorder, and substance abuse
   2. does peer rejection actually cause problems at school and in adjustment or does children’s maladaptive behavior (e.g., aggression) lead to both peer rejection and problems in adjustment
      1. Self fulfilling prophecy: children who are aggressive may become rejected by their peers, which then leads them to be both lonely and angry, which they express through more aggression
2. Withdrawn rejected children: rejected children who are socially withdrawn, wary, and often timid
   1. Often victimized, feel more isolated, lonely, depressed
   2. By middle/late ES, children highly withdrawn stand out, tend to be disliked and appear to become increasingly alienated from the group over time
      1. Negative feedback loop
         1. withdrawn children are rejected by their peers, which leads them to withdraw further to avoid peer rejection, a pattern that can repeat over and over
3. Neglected Children: children or adolescents who are infrequently mentioned as either liked or disliked; they simply are not noticed much by peers
   1. They relatively socially competent
      1. Ranked as just as socially competent as peers
   2. both less sociable and less disruptive than average children
   3. likely to back away from peer interactions that involve aggression
   4. perceive that they receive less support from peers, yet they are not particularly anxious about their social interactions
   5. They appear to be neglected primarily because they are simply not noticed by their peers.
4. Controversial Children: children or adolescents who are liked by quite a few peers and are disliked by quite a few others
   1. characteristics of both popular and rejected children
      1. For example, they tend to be aggressive, disruptive, and prone to anger, but they also tend to be cooperative, sociable, good at sports, and humorous
   2. they are very socially active and tend to be group leaders
   3. aggressive children sometimes develop a network of aggressive friends and are accepted in their peer group
      1. Viewed as cool for being aggressive
   4. tend to be viewed by peers as arrogant and snobbish

Cross cultural similarities and differences in factors related to peer status

• Cross culturally, socially rejected children tend to be aggressive and disruptive while popular children tend to be prosocial and to have leadership skills
  • rejected children, especially those who are aggressive, are more likely than their peers to have academic difficulties and lower gpas and more absences
• (agressive kids) are uninterested in school and to be viewed by peers and teachers as poor students
• students’ classroom participation is lower during periods in which they are rejected by peers than during periods when they are not, and that the tendency of rejected children to do relatively poorly in school worsens across time
  • 25% to 30% of rejected children drop out of school, compared with approximately 8% or less of other children
• withdrawal becomes linked with peer rejection in preschool or elementary school
• Chinese children who were shy, sensitive, and cautious or inhibited in their behavior were viewed by teachers as socially competent and as leaders, and they were liked by their peers
  • Chinese culture traditionally values self-effacing, withdrawn behavior, and Chinese children are encouraged to behave accordingly
• In china, some see shyness as bad and some see it as good, however more so good
  • Peers feel a bit uncertain about how to feel about shy kids
• children who aren't interested in socializing are often rejected by their peers
  • North American children, where not wanting to socialize isn't a big deal, especially for younger kids

Lecture 14:

*Friendship

Friend: a person with whom an individual has an intimate, reciprocated, and positive relationship

Children’s choice of friends

• Determinants of friendship: opposites attract, or birds of a feather flock together?
• Children tend to be friends with peers who are similar to themselves
  • Eg in age, gender, interests, persoanlity
• Other characteristics
  • Friendly and prosocial
  • Proximity
  • racial/ethnic group; can be cross-racial

Developmental changes in friendship

• 12-18 months
  • Display peer preference (ex. Through touching, smiling, positive interactions
• 24 months
  • Greater complexity through imitating, cooperative problem solving, and trading roles during play
• By 3-4 years
  • Make and maintain peer friendships
  • “Best friends”
  • Same gender play preference
• By 5 years
  • Communicate, cooperate, and work together more effectively
  • Fight and negotiate
• By 6-8 years
  • Define friendship based on actual peer activities
• By 9 years
  • Take care of friends physical and material needs
  • General assistance and help
• Adolescence
  • Important source of intimacy and self disclosure
  • Honest feedback
  • Less stable
  • 10+ yeats: time in groups with other sex peers increases steadiliy

CONCEPTS:

• Selman (1980)
  • Suggests age related changes in childrens friendships are tired to qualitative shifts in perspective taking abilities
• Initially. Younge children are egocentrirc
  • Limits their understanding of friendhsios, focusing mainly on their own needs
• With maturity, children can comprehend others perspectives
  • Friendships involve considering both party’s needs
• Ex. whats the difference between a food friend and a best friend?
  • From 9 years on: complexity ind escriptions increased as similar rates
    • High friendfship = mutual understanding and support, includes intimacy and trust
    • Low friendships = interactions between two people; no difference between physical and psychological closeness

Functions of friendships

Support and validation

• Provide support and validation when a child feels lonely, during difficult periods of transition that involves peers
• Serve as a buffer against unpleasant experiences

Help develop social skills, positive relationshops with other people

Gender differences

• Girls are more likely than boys to desire closeness and dependency
  • More upset when a friend betrays them
  • More likely to ruminate
• Gender atypical youth have more difficultures forming friendships
• Few gender differences inf riendship stability

Potential negative influences of friendships

• Aggression and disruptiveness
• Alcohol and substance use
• Bullying and victimization

Difficult to disentangle causality

• Peer socialization hypothesis:
  • Peers → behaviors
• Peer selection hypothesis:
  • Behavior → peers

*Sociometric status

Measures peer acceptance

• Social preference: reflects degree to which children are liked or disliked by their peers as a group
• Social impact: degree to which children are noticed

Classifies children into one of five groups (SOCIOMETRIC CATEGORIES)

1. Popular: designated as popular is they are rated by their peers as being highly liked and accepted and highly impactful
2. Rejected: children are designated as rejected if they are low in acceptance and preference and high in rejection but also high in impact
3. Neglected: children are designated as neglected if they are low in social impact – that is, if they receive few positive or negative ratings. These children are not especially liked or disliked by peers; they simply go unnoticed
4. Average: children are designated as average if they receive moderate ratings on both impact and preference
5. Controversial: children are designated as controversial if they are rated as very high in impact but average in preference. They are noticed by peers and are liked by quite a few children and disliked by quite a few others

Cross-cultural sociometric findings

• In several countries
  • Socially rejected children → aggressive, disruptive
  • Popular children → prosocial, have leadership skills
  • Peers reject withdrawn children
• Shy Chinese children are different from shy Western children
  • The culture encourages such behavior
  • Western cultures encourage independence and self-assertion
  • Rural areas have a similar impact

CHAPTER 15 READING, pages. 539-561

Theoretical Explanations for Gender Development

• Nature and nurture play a role in gender development.
  • Born genes
  • How your parents raised you
  • Culture factors

Physiological Influences:

all behavior and thinking are biologically based because they depend on the functioning of our brain and other organs. At the same time, all experiences lead to changes in the brain’s organization

• ways that neuroscientists investigate if and how sex-related variations in genes, the nervous system, and the endocrine system, may contribute to gender development.
• Genes
  • Biological sex is usually determined by whether a person with 46 chromosomes has a pair that is either XX (genetically female) or XY (genetically male)
    • Sometimes they are missing or extra
  • sex-linked genetic dispositions lead men toward being aggressive and women toward being nurturing
    • studies with mice indicate links between Y chromosome genes and aggressive and parenting behaviors as well as links between X chromosome genes and social behavior
      • These links have not been documented in humans
• Hormones and brain functioning
  • Hormones are chemical messengers produced in endocrine glands and transmitted through the bloodstream to parts of the body
  • Androgens: class of steroid hormones that normally occur at slightly higher levels in biological males than in biological females and that affect physical development and functioning from the prenatal period onward
  • Androgens and other hormones can have organizing or activating influences on the nervous system
    • Organizing influences occur when certain sex-linked hormones affect brain differentiation and organization during prenatal development or at puberty.
      • For example, sex-related differences in prenatal androgens may influence the organization and functioning of the nervous system; in turn, this may be related to later average gender differences in certain play preferences
    • Activating influences occur when fluctuations in sex-linked hormone levels influence the contemporaneous activation of certain brain and behavioral responses
      • For instance, the body increases the production of testosterone in response to perceived threats, which has possible implications for average gender differences in aggression.
• Brain structure and functioning
  • Adult male brains 11% bigger, no advantage
    • Gender results is some small but negligible brain structure differences
    • do not appear to result in any sex differences with meaningful effect sizes in cognitive performance
    • Great deal of overlap between brains
    • No brain structures are unique to one sex
  • LIMITATION of of research documenting sex differences in brain structure
    • it is mostly based on brain-imaging studies performed on adults
  • it is unclear to what extent any average sex differences in adult brain structure or functioning are due to genetic or environmental influences
  • It is also unclear to what extent these small average sex differences in brain structure determine any average gender differences in ability and behavior

Cognitive and Motivational Influences

Cognitive theories of gender development address the ways that children learn gender-typed attitudes and behaviors through observation, inference, and practice.

• Self-socialization: active process during development whereby children’s cognitions lead them to perceive the world and to act in accord with their expectations and beliefs
• Gender Schema Theory
  • According to the theory, children’s understanding of gender develops through their construction of gender schemas, which are mental representations based on a person’s knowledge, stereotypes, and attitudes about gender.
    • individuals’ gender schemas guide what they notice, how they interpret information, and what they remember.
• Social Cognitive Theory
• Social Identity Theory
• Developmental Intergroup Theory

Cultural Influences:

• Bioecological Model

Milestones in Gender Development

Prenatal Development:

• Typical prenatal sexual differentiation
• Variations in prenatal sexual differentiation

Infancy and Toddlerhood:

• xyz

Early Childhood:

• Gender Attitudes and Behaviors

Middle Childhood:

• Gender Constancy
• Societal Understadning of Gender
• Gender Typed Behaviors

Adolescence:

• Physical development
• Gender segregated peer affiliations
• Gender role flexibility and gender intensification

LECTURE 15: Milestones in gender development

Prenatal Development:

• Main change: sexual reproductive organs are formed
• Around 6 weeks: ovaries or testes form
• Arounf 7 to 10 weeks: two sets of ducts formed
• Between 8 to 12 weeks, external genitalia are formed

Infancy and Toddlerhood:

• Main changes: recognize gender and gendered behavior
• Infants distinguish between men and women
• Toddlers form gender sterotypical conditioned associations

Early Childhood:

• Main change: children are developing mental concepts of gender
• Between 2.5--3 years: children self label,e stablish gender identity
• From 2-6 years, children learn gender seterotypes in multiple domains
  • (appearances → Toys and activities → personal/social attributes → roles)

Middle Childhood:

Main changes: gender constancy, social understanding of gender

• Around 6 years: gender constancy
• Sround 9-10 years: understand gender as a social cateogroy
• Continue to prefer gender typed play, peers
• + cognitive flexibility (understand theres multiple ways gender can be expressed)

Adolescence:

• Main changes: bodily transformations an dgender toles
• Around 12-18 years: Puberty (and body image)
• Gender segregated peer affiliations
• Changing views of gender roles
  • Gender role felxibility; Recognition of gender roles of social conventions
  • Gender role intensification: heightened concerns about adhering to traditional roles

Theoretical Explanation:

Physiological influences

• • Genes
  • Hormones and brain functioning
    • Androgens
    • Organizing vs activating influences
  • Brain structure and functioning
• Cognitive and motivation approaches
  • Children form expectations about gender that guides behavior and shapes motivation
  • Theories
    • Gender schema theory: mental representations of gender
      • Emphasizes that children develop in group and outgroup schemas
      • Although children end to be interested in what is approprate for their gender, their own interestes in an activity can be held parallel or override thier beliefs on gender
    • Social cognitive theory: children learn about gender through obersvatioin
    • Social identitiy theory: children recognize societies are organized around gender.
      • They idenfoy with their gender and prefer peers who are in their gender and behave in typically that gender way
    • Developmental intergroup theory (DIT)
      • Lalallalalalalala
      • Teacher say “good morning boys and girls”